America’s major cities are in a shocking state of decline.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the socialist nightmare of San Francisco.
And a top Trump official dropped one fact about San Francisco that left Nancy Pelosi fuming.
The pandemic decimated major cities across the country after Democrat-controlled governments instituted crippling lockdowns and other restrictions.
Residents began pouring out of places like New York City and San Francisco in search of a better life elsewhere.
A University of Toronto study found that many major Democrat-controlled cities still haven’t recovered from the pandemic.
The study revealed that foot traffic is still below pre-pandemic levels from 2019 in several big cities with Democrat Mayors.
The data showed that cities with Democrat Mayors including Portland, Oregon; Seattle Washington; Chicago, Illinois; and San Francisco, California all ranked towards the bottom of 66 cities that have the least foot traffic recovered since 2019.
Economist Stephen Moore, who worked on former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said that the lack of recovery in Democrat-controlled cities was “distressing” during an interview on Fox Business.
“It’s almost all of these big blue cities. It’s San Francisco, it’s Oakland, it’s Minneapolis. It’s my home city of Chicago,” Moore said. “These numbers are really distressing.”
The University of Toronto’s “Downtown Recovery Rankings” compared the number of visitors to a city from March through the middle of June 2023 with data from mobile devices compared to the same period in 2019.
San Francisco, represented in Congress by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), has only recovered 66% of its foot traffic while St. Louis, Missouri had the worst foot traffic recovery at 53%.
The lack of foot traffic in these cities is leading to a decline in economic activity with fewer people in the area.
Moore said the data “shows that there’s about one-third less economic activity in the downtown area of these cities.”
These cities were hit with a double whammy in 2020 of the pandemic and a crime wave that broke out after many of these cities got on board with the disastrous “Defund the Police” movement.
The economist said the surge in crime was keeping people from returning to these cities post-pandemic.
“Why is that? I think it’s because of the fact that . . . the carjackings, the crime, the fact that you have these high taxes in these areas,” Moore said. “By the way, when you have fewer people going into the cities, think about the impact that has on the stores, the restaurants, and so on.”
Residents and visitors voted with their feet to head elsewhere after these Democrat-controlled cities became nightmares.