$49m to live four blocks from THAT drug market? San Francisco’s ultra-luxurious Four Seasons Residences sells just 13 of its 146 apartments, as street crime and drug abuse are blamed for deterring prospective buyers including Steph and Ayesha Curry
- The luxury Four Seasons apartment building The Tower Residences has sold just 13 of its 146 units in the two years since it opened
- The apartment building features a $49million penthouse and a host of amenities, and also sits right in the middle of the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods, which have become hubs for open drug use in the city
- The Tenderloin Linkage Center sits just four blocks away. Set up by the city to try and treat drug addicts, it has instead descended into a hub of hard drug use, with associated crime spilling out onto nearby streets
- One prominent buyer poised to pick up an apartment was NBA player Stephen Curry, who with his wife Ayesha reportedly signed for an $8million 2,800-square-foot 30th-floor condo in 2020
- But as of October, not one of the 13 sales at the Tower Residences lists the Currys’ name or LLCs associated with them, suggesting the basketball star abandoned his plans to move into the building
- Crimes in San Francisco are up 7.4 percent from the same period last year, assaults are up 11.1 percent and robberies are up 5.2 percent, with much of that activity taking place in the blocks surrounding the building
- Drug treatment centers in Tenderloin and SoMa have been blamed for drawing scores of drug users to the neighborhoods, converting them into open-air drug markets with encampments lining the sidewalks
A luxury Four Seasons apartment high rise located steps from San Francisco’s notorious open-air drug market has sold just 13 of its 146 units in the two years since the building opened.
The Tower Residences, which features a $49million penthouse, views of the San Francisco Bay, and a host of amenities – including a car elevator – is located smack in the middle of the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods, which have become the epicenters of the beleaguered city’s crime and drug problems.
It sits just four blocks from San Francisco’s infamous Tenderloin Linkage Center.
The city-run facility was set up earlier this year to try and help homeless drug abusers, but has since descended into what locals say is effectively legal drug abuse.
They complain the center has destroyed their quality of life, and send associated crime spilling out onto downtown San Francisco’s streets, which remain eerily deserted as most locals continue to work from home.
The last sale at the apartment building was on June 1, according to the San Francisco Business Times, meaning there wasn’t a single deal in all of 2022’s third quarter.
The building opened up its units for presale in 2020 after four years of construction at an estimated $500million price tag.
The building offers 24-hour concierge service, touts ‘rare inner circle access’ to events San Francisco’s art scene and California’s wine scene, and has an entire floor called ‘The Club,’ which includes a bar, a dining room, a fitness center, and event spaces.
The units themselves are ‘sized like grand estate homes,’ according to architect Glenn Rescalvo, who said ‘you feel like you’re hovering above the gardens’ in an interview.
Each unit takes up an entire floor, and features full luxury appointments, and corners living rooms with glass on two sides.
One prominent buyer poised to pick up an apartment was NBA player Stephen Curry, who with his wife Ayesha reportedly signed for an $8million 2,800-square-foot 30th-floor condo in 2020.
But as of October, not one of the 13 sales at the Tower Residences lists the Currys’ name or LLCs associated with them, according to the Business Journal, suggesting the basketball star abandoned his plans to move into the building.
It is unclear exactly why the rich have turned away from the Tower Residences, but major crimes in San Francisco are up 7.4 percent from the same period last year, assaults are up 11.1 percent and robberies are up 5.2 percent, with much of that nefarious activity taking place in the blocks surrounding the building.
The luxury Four Seasons apartment tower the Tower Residences has sold just 13 of its 146 units in the two years since it opened
One prominent buyer to pick up an apartment at the Tower Residences was NBA player Stephen Curry, who with his wife Ayesha reportedly signed for an $8million 2,800-square-foot 30th-floor condo in 2020. But by fall 2022 his name did not appear on the any of the sales at the building
Both the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods are home to a pair of drug treatment facilities opened by San Francisco, which locals complain have done little more than attract scores of dangerous addicts to the streets.
The Tenderloin Linkage Center was opened in January 2022 with the intent of helping the city’s homeless population and drug addicts to find help.
But the center, which pays $75,000 a month in rent and costs about $19million to run, announced it will be closing at the end of the year after failing to curtail the problem in the crime-ridden city.
Critics noted that only 0.1 percent of people who visited the center for help were directed to treatment in the first five months. Between January and April, just 18 of the 23,367 drug users who visited the site were referred for treatment.
And a prominent feature of the Linkage Center was providing a ‘safe space’ for users to shoot up, which critics say did little to solve anything.
Instead of treating the problem, the center transformed into an open-air drug market, with users camped out inside the center and on the surrounding streets, shooting up freely in the open passing out where they sat.
And down the road in SoMa, residents say they are arming themselves with baseball bats and stun guns after a newly-opened drug sobering facility drew violent addicts to a previously peaceful neighborhood.
Neighborhood locals are voicing outrage, saying ever since the SoMa RISE drug sobering center opened in June, ‘troublemakers’ have plagued the neighborhood.
Residents told Fox News that rather than tempering drug usage, the center has done little more than draw heavy users to the neighborhood.
With those users comes crime, residents said, which casts a pall of danger over the neighborhood.
The center was opened with the help of Democratic San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who characterized it as a safe haven for addicts looking to get back on their feet.
Mayor Breed’s office characterized SoMa as a ‘safe indoor space’ for addicts to ‘get off the streets’ and regather themselves and ‘stabilize.’
But SoMa resident and business owner Mark Sackett said things were not playing out nearly as the city intended.
‘They’re letting their clients come out here and get high, go inside and get sober and then get high again,’ Sackett told ABC7.
The Tower Residences is located smack in the middle of the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods, which have become the epicenters of the beleaguered city’s crime and drug problems
The building opened up its units for presale in 2020 after four years of construction at an estimated $500million price tag
The apartment building features a $49million penthouse, views of the San Francisco Bay, and a host of amenities , including a car elevator
Another resident, only identified as Ghis, gave a similar account to ABC7.
‘More troublemakers settling in, feeling comfortable doing their drugs, pissing and s****ting in the street blocking the sidewalks,’ Ghis said, adding the neighborhood was going through ‘a period of insanity.
Another local named Bill said the trouble started when the center opened, and that ever since he has wondered whether he was in danger every time he left home to go to work.
‘Every morning it’s a roulette. When you show up at your office, are there going to be 10 people passed out in front of your building?’ he said. ‘Are they going to be violent? This was never a problem before HealthRight 360 moved in.’
‘If you ask me, it should be closed down and there should be other approaches to the homeless and drug problem we’re all facing,’ Bill added.
Both the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods are home to a pair of drug treatment facilities opened by San Francisco, which locals complain have done little more than attract scores of dangerous addicts to the streets
Both the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods are home to a pair of drug treatment facilities opened by San Francisco, which locals complain have done little more than attract scores of dangerous addicts to the streets
Instead of treating the problem, the Tenderloin Linkage Center transformed into an open-air drug market, with users camped out inside the center and on the surrounding streets, shooting up freely in the open passing out where they sat
Amid scenes of misery on city streets, where drug use is brazen and homelessness is rampant, a recent poll found that a majority of San Franciscans believe their city is going down hill, and a third plan to leave the city within three years.
A survey of 1,653 adults found that 65 percent said the city was declining, while 37 percent said they would live elsewhere in three years. A staggering 84 percent of people aged 65 and over said they are planning to leave.
It paints a bleak portrait of an iconic city famed for its Golden Gate Bridge and colorful ‘Painted Ladies’ homes being wracked by poor leadership and urban decay, where the sight of addicts shooting up on sidewalks is now all too common.
The survey was carried out by The San Francisco Chronicle after the recall election of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was ousted in June amid frustration over public safety in the deeply Democratic city.
Respondents largely agreed on the city’s top problems: Homelessness took first place, followed by public safety and housing costs. Nearly 70 percent said they doubted those problems would get better in the coming three years.
One respondent, Dae Echols, 53, told The Chronicle he was ‘fed up with the city’ and rising prices would likely force him to retire elsewhere. The average rent in San Francisco has risen to $3,750 per month.
‘I just remember the hippie generation, and it was all about, take care of your friends, brotherly love. And that is totally gone,’ said Echols.
Major crimes in San Francisco are up 7.4 percent so far this year from the same period in 2021
San Francisco officials last month unveiled what they said was a deliberately ‘soft touch’ scheme to deal with the city’s relentless drug crisis – insisting that under their plan ‘nobody’s going to jail,’ but remaining vague on how to end the problem.
With nearly 1,700 fatal overdoses since the start of 2020, San Francisco’s drug crisis has resulted in almost double the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new plan, named ‘San Francisco Recovers,’ appeared remarkably similar to the safe-space and open-air market approach the Linkage Center employed.
The plan promoted ‘supervised consumption sites where drug users can safely use substances under medical supervision to prevent accidental overdose deaths.’
Matt Dorsey, a supervisor, said that the goals were deliberately ‘soft touch.’
They include electronically-tagging users and having police officers track them down and confiscate their drugs if they wander into known drug-dealing areas.
San Francisco’s supervisors want job placement and training instead of imprisonment for those who agree to stop drug dealing, and ‘right to recovery’ zones near treatment centers, with zero tolerance for possession or dealing.
‘This is a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes,’ Dorsey said, according to The San Francisco Standard.
Some residents blame Mayor London Breed, whose earlier popularity for steering the city through the pandemic appears to have waned amid rising crime, the fentanyl epidemic and other woes.
Parisa Safarzadeh, spokeswoman for London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, said the Linkage Center had been a valuable experiment.
She said the site was an ‘immediate intervention to stabilize the community in the short term while the city developed its longer term plans for the Tenderloin.’
Frustration with San Francisco’s decline has intensified in recent months, with the ejection of progressive DA Chesa Boudin in a recall election following community outrage over his perceived soft policies.
Gina McDonald, a co-founder of Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD), told DailyMail.com they welcomed the closure of the site, saying that many contractors had made huge profits from its operations.
‘San Francisco has become Gotham,’ she said. ‘It has to change.’
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