Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck them.
Take London, for instance. Anyone in charge of our capital needed only to maintain it, if not improve it. Yet in almost a decade as mayor, Sadiq Khan has overseen a decline which is obvious to any resident or visitor.
That first sign of rot – the tolerance of minor crime – is everywhere. It might be graffiti on the Tube. Or it might be the fact that it is risky to hold a mobile phone in the street or park a bicycle. Khan’s police aren’t interested in minor crimes such as phone and bicycle theft. And they’re not much interested in major crimes either, such as stabbings.
Yet somehow, it doesn’t matter. Khan was re-elected mayor last year, and this week he went off to Buckingham Palace to become Sir Sadiq.
It’s a similar story with Gavin Newsom in California. He has been governor of America’s most beautiful and prosperous state since 2019, and won re-election in 2022. Before that he was mayor of San Francisco, which should be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. But Newsom has a skill for wrecking everything he touches.
During his mayoralty, San Francisco became ever more dystopian. The rich would descend from unaffordable apartment complexes on to once-desirable streets where the ‘unhoused’ roamed around on crack and exposed themselves furiously. It became perfectly normal to walk down any road and think you must have been transported into a zombie movie, with the undead pushing around trolleys of their possessions.
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