"Doom Loop Walking Tour" Of San Francisco Sells Out

There's a new entertainment option for people morbidly fascinated with San Francisco's relentless decline: a "Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour." 

The, anonymous, dry-witted host invites tourists to "discover the policy choices that made America's wealthiest city the nation's innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis." It's not clear if this will be an ongoing offering, but the maiden tour -- set for Saturday, August 26 -- is already sold out. 

"You will find no better expert," reads the tour's promotional page. "Your guide is an urban policy professional, card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m, and cofounder of San Francisco's largest neighborhood association. He has spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss." 

 "The tour will start at City Hall, and continue through Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. We will view the open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores."

San Francisco has deteriorated so much that federal officials are now advising hundreds of Health and Human Services employees to work remotely for the foreseeable future, rather than wade through "one of the city's most brazen open-air drug markets" that's just outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building on Seventh Street. 

 Instead of profit, the tour guide is apparently seeking an outlet for his policy frustrations. He says the tour "is the result of his own mental-health crisis," and that he'll donate proceeds to "a non-profit that does not actively degrade its community." 

The 90-minute,1.5 mile tour promises to tackle a number of questions: 

"How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless ('cruel and inhuman'; 'violation of multiple human rights')?"

This woman might be close to figuring it out: 

Let's just hope the tour doesn't get too good a look at the crime situation.