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Want more food deserts in San Francisco?
Here's how you get more food deserts in San Francisco.
According to Reason magazine:
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.
Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months' written notice to the city before closing down.
Supermarket operators would also have to make "good faith" efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery co-op, or any other plan they might work out by meeting with city and neighborhood residents.
Lest one thinks this is some heavy-handed City Hall intervention, the ordinance makes clear that owners still retain the ultimate power to close their store. It also creates a number of exemptions to the six-month notice requirement. If a store is closing because of a natural disaster or business circumstances that aren't "reasonably foreseeable," it doesn't have to provide the full six months' notice.
For the poor, that's bad news because all it will do is ensure that new grocery stores don't open.
Who'd want to do business in a city that requires six months' notice plus the difficult task of getting a replacement or organizing a food co-op for the 'privilege' of closure when all they want to do is get out?
It's an absolute disincentive to try to supply food to all the local residents in the area, and for those without cars, of which there are many, they're looking at two-hour journeys by the lousiest city buses, driven by the meanest union drivers, with the highest number of bums onboard in close quarters in any urban area.
As for the owners, it's no treat either. Under the new law, this cumbersome regulation to businesses that are clearly in distress is nothing more than insult added to injury. They pay high taxes for the privilege of operating there, they sustain so much thievery they have to put their goods behind plexiglass cases, which costs money, they get zero law enforcement help when they get robbed because thefts are so common, and as a last resort, they try to close doors, they get hit by a raft of lawsuits.
But for the thieves of San Francisco, who steal and fence stolen goods as a lifestyle choice to pay for illegal drugs, the six-months' notice, plus the right to file lawsuits, is a gravy bonanza.
Imagine being a thief who steals daily from a local grocery, taking advantage of the state's $950 per haul per day law to avoid a felony charge or any enforcement at all, and then learns that the store owner can't take it anymore and has decided to Go Galt and close his doors. If that store owner he's robbed daily doesn't have a six-month supply of new things for him to steal, whe gets to sue the owner for everything he owns, after robbing him blind in the first place.
Sound like a good place to open a grocery?
Not to normal people. What this monstrous regulation is is a revenge move by vindictive leftists who will do anything to avoid taking responsibility for the results of their own destructive policies. It's not that stores will stop closing as a result of this new law. It's that new stores will never open.
Image: Screen shot from ABC7 video, via YouTube