Water Tower Place, an eight-story, 758,000 sq. ft. high-end shopping mall in downtown Chicago, is in the news.
Once one of the biggest and most exciting malls in the Midwest, it quietly leaked that the owners are interested in renting out the top five of its eight floors “for purposes other than retail.”
Not just wealthy shoppers, but even browsing tourists, too, it seems, are staying away in droves.
The terrifying reality of life on San Francisco’s drug-ravaged streets has been laid bare by one life-long resident who filmed her walk to work through scenes that have made the city an international symbol for squalor and despair.
Tiktoker ‘Freqmeek’ captured the pre-dawn horror as she gingerly picked her way through dozens of desperate addicts in the city’s Tenderloin district.
Some are hunched against the cold while others are too intoxicated to care as cars and buses try to steer a path through unconscious addicts sprawled across the road for hundreds of yards.
Major cities in the country continue to see their quality of life decrease as crime increases. It is not only violent crime that is causing problems, either.
As of mid-September, Oakland, California, had recorded 11,417 motor vehicle thefts or nearly 41 car thefts a day. In just the week of Oct. 2 – 8, 125 cars were stolen, according to the Oakland Police Department crime data. This does not include the 549 carjackings for the year, which falls under robberies.
Overall, car thefts are up 50 percent over 2022, and carjackings are up 21 percent.
After the Maine massacre, we are hearing the familiar response to a mass shooting by a mentally ill man, which is to deprive everyone of their civil rights. The reality is that if you have violent and dangerous people on the loose, they will get their hands on guns or other weapons, regardless of whatever laws there are. Gun control doesn’t stop killers, it stops people from protecting themselves. If you want to stop mentally unstable mass shooters, institutionalize them.
A woke Lower East Side bookstore is bringing fear and loathing to the neighborhood by luring hordes of drug addicts to their storefront with clothes, hygiene products, food and drinks — and even a bathroom where they can shoot up, neighbors told The Post.
A convicted pedophile has been arrested after setting up a homeless camp outside of a San Francisco school with a sign offering ‘free fentanyl 4 new users’.
Adam Moore, 46, set up an encampment across from Stella Maris Academy in the embattled California city over two years ago.
Moore had been stationed outside the school with signs offering free drugs, with one reading: ‘Free fentanyl 4 new users’ and another saying ‘Meth for stolen items’.
Another video shows the Tesla incident in Lower Wacker from a different perspective. Spectators sit on top of the Tesla as the driver continuously honks the horn before eventually driving off, seemingly out of desperation. #chicagoscanner pic.twitter.com/u7C3a6p9n8
— CHICAGO CRITTER (@ChicagoCritter) October 15, 2023
“… Minority pupils compose 89 percent of Chicago’s public-school student body. In third through eighth grades, the percentage of Black students proficient in reading and math are 11 percent and 6 percent. Hispanics: 17 percent, 11 percent. The percentage of 11th-graders proficient on the SAT in reading and math: Black students 10 and 8; Hispanics: 16 and 17. In 22 schools, not a single student can read at grade level; in 33, not a single student can do math at grade level. Even the supposedly good news is disgusting: Last year, the graduation rate was a record high 82.9 percent — even though chronic absenteeism is 49 percent among low-income students.”
Better Off Truant?
For generations, American politicians and experts have lamented the dropout crisis. They warn that quitting school leads students to poverty, prison, and discontent. For many Baltimore schoolchildren, however, recent test results show leaving school might be their best option—or at least, it wouldn’t hurt.
Last year, Baltimore’s public schools spent $22,000 per student, a record figure slated to rise over the next decade under the state’s $30 billion education-spending plan, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. City schools have also raked in $799 million in Covid relief.
The massive looting sprees and violence against both pedestrians and police in Philadephia have been too much for even the legacy media to ignore. Retail stores, state liquor distributors, and pharmacies have been utterly destroyed and emptied of anything that can be sold on the black market, while the city’s understaffed law enforcement units struggle to bring down at least a few of the gangsters. But to their credit, they have managed to make at least some arrests. So what will happen to these violent vandals? That remains an open question, apparently. The city’s infamous District Attorney, Larry Krasner, was asked about it yesterday. He appears to be taking a “wait and see” approach, insisting that the criminals will have to be dealt with in “an even-handed way.”
Remember the glory days of the Summer of Love 2020, when the “mostly peaceful” protests to honor the martyrdom of St. Floyd the Recidivist ravaged cities and murdered innocents? His apostles having gotten a little too frisky with the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot tried to pre-empt them.
After enduring another looting frenzy, Philadelphia residents wonder whether mass thuggery is just a fact of life in the city.
“Here we go again—it’s a Philly Thing” was the message on Philadelphia social media, especially Facebook, where posters reported that the city was once again under siege.
Scattered first reports mentioned a caravan of looters moving from one neighborhood to another: Center City, West Philadelphia, Port Richmond, and then on to the Roosevelt Mall in Northeast Philadelphia. The marauders managed to pillage 18 state-run liquor stores, causing the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to close all 48 of its Philadelphia retail outlets. In Center City, plunderers ransacked the Apple store, Footlocker, and Lululemon. Some wore Halloween masks as they grabbed merchandise and were cheered on by Philadelphia Instagram celebrity Dayjia Blackwell, 21, known as “Meatball,” who told her 200,000 followers: “We outside. This is what happens when we get no justice in our city. We terrorize this city!”
Portland’s public safety commissioner has told people to not call 911 unless they’re at risk of death – as the Democrat-run city continues to struggle with rampant drug use and a slew of overdoses.
Commissioner Rene Gonzalez told locals that its emergency service hotline was overwhelmed with people calling about members of the public suffering fentanyl overdoses. Oregon decriminalized hard drug use three years ago.
As a result, he urged people to only call 911 in a life or death emergency, as it was revealed paramedics had been called to deal with eight suspected fentanyl overdoses in the city’s once-tony Pearl District.
Chicago’s criminal class is feeling a little left out these days. They’re envious of all the smash-and-grab looters that are operating out west. So Chicago’s criminals decided to go the looters one better.
Seattle’s so woke that the criminals think they run the justice system now, and we can prove it.
There was a delicious bit of schadenfreude in court on Thursday listening to an accused bad guy ask plaintively of a judge (paraphrasing here) “Wait, why can’t I get the easy-on-criminals treatment that every other bad guy has gotten?”
