Political and Economic Stakes Are High for San Francisco This Week

By admin

Published 12 months ago on

November 13, 2023

San Francisco has been going through a rough patch in recent years, which raises the stakes for the city as it hosts a massive economic conference of Pacific Rim nations this week.

Dan Walters

CalMatters

Opinion

The city is besieged by what some call a “doom loop” of often violent street crime, a drug abuse epidemic, a flight of corporate and commercial business and – most visibly – rampant and extremely visible homelessness.

San Francisco’s civic ills have so far defied officialdom’s efforts to restore the city’s once envied status as a global icon – in part because Mayor London Breed, who could face a dicey re-election next year, squabbles incessantly with the city’s Board of Supervisors over every fine point of policy.

Breed, on behalf of the city and her own political career, hopes that the thousands of government officials, corporate executives and international journalists attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Commission, or APEC, gathering will depart with positive views of her city.

‘Desperate’ Attempts to Clean up Blight

To that end, the city has made vigorous, even desperate, attempts to temporarily clean up its blight and prepare for traffic snarls and massive political demonstrations.

“We plan to do everything we can to allow people to protest peacefully, to make sure that the delegates have a great experience, and that people are safe,” the mayor has said, probably with her fingers crossed.

There’s more at stake than San Francisco’s image, of course.

While 21 Pacific Rim nations have sent delegations to the conference, all eyes will be on U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who are scheduled to have a face-to-face meeting.

Biden has ramped up economic and diplomatic pressure on China since becoming president, seeing it as an ambitious rival which wants to dominate Asia and eventually supplant the United States as a globe’s most powerful nation.

It’s important for Biden to come across as decisive and effective in dealing with his Chinese counterpart. The president’s political support level has dropped sharply in recent months, in part because of his age, and he also faces a tough re-election campaign next year.

The APEC conference also happens to coincide with two international hot spots, the war between Ukraine and Russia and the bloody clash between Israel and the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza. China has been more or less supportive of both Russia and Hamas while the U.S. is backing the Ukraine and Israel, although there are sharp domestic political divisions over both policies.

What could possibly go wrong? Potentially everything.

The demonstrations, particularly those of far-left anarchists, could get out of hand. They would like nothing better than to be disruptive enough to spark a harsh crackdown by police that would draw global media attention.

That’s what happened in 1999 when the World Trade Organization convened a conference in Seattle and some of the more than 40,000 protesters clashed with police.

Delegates could run afoul of San Francisco’s notorious street criminals, who have victimized tourists and conventioneers in the past.

The traffic could become so bad that those who still commute into the city from suburbs – already much less numerous than pre-pandemic days – would call it quits, which would put an even greater strain on a city budget already leaking red ink. The city is highly dependent on downtown business activity and has seen sharp declines in those revenues.

Finally, the talks between Biden and Xi could blow up, putting an indelible stain on anything otherwise positive.

Simply put, everyone involved in APEC this week is playing for high political and economic stakes and that’s particularly true of the host city.

About the Author

Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more columns by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.

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