A distraught San Francisco business owner has said his restaurants have been robbed, vandalized and targeted for extortion as the city continues to struggle with a crime and drug crisis.
Hanson Li, whose Salt Partners group manages prominent restaurants in the nation, said three of his businesses have been targeted in recent weeks.
Lazy Susan, a Chinese food eatery, was broken into on Monday, just days after its storefront was defaced – and weeks after another of the group’s bar was vandalized.
‘I was very heated [on Monday]. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. All these seemingly small things not only have actual dollar repercussions but then like the repairs are going to be two times what they took,’ Li said.
While the thieves triggered an alarm system that automatically alerts the San Francisco Police Department, cops did not get to the restaurant in time to stop the robbery, Li told SFGate.
Hanson Li, whose Salt Partners group manages prominent restaurants in the nation, said three of his businesses have been targeted in recent weeks
Lazy Susan’s front door, pried open with a tool, will cost a few thousand dollars to repair
The Chinese food restaurant’s storefront was defaced just days before being broken into
Robbers took cash, a laptop and a 50-pound safe. Li added that the stolen items were worth around $4,000 and it will cost another $2,000 to replace the storefront. The door, which was pried open with a tool, will cost another few thousand to repair.
The break in came just weeks after Li’s partner at another business, Last Rites, received a text from someone threatening to deploy bear spray at the bar unless they were paid $20,000 by August 21.
Li contacted police, but the bar was never defaced.
However, another of his bars, Horsefeather, saw its new parklets vandalized with graffiti. It’s not clear if there was a connection to the extortion attempt.
‘They took their time,’ Li said of the incident. “We just tore down our pandemic parklet and rebuilt two new parklets to the new code for open spaces. We spent over $50,000 on the parklets.’
While the parklets have since been cleaned up, Li expressed frustration over the situation, and his hope that the city can do more to protect businesses.
All three Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream stores, also managed by his group, have been burglarized this year.
Li’s testimony is just the latest from a business owner fed up with crime in San Franciscco, which has seen a max exodus of huge brands.
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Hordes of brand names including the likes of Whole Food and Nordstrom have recently moved out of the California city amid widespread crime and plummeting footfall.
San Francisco’s once bustling Union Square and downtown area is a shadow of its former self: rows of empty stores, sparse crowds even on peak weekend shopping days and nearby hotels – including a huge Hilton – unable to cover their mortgage payments.
Another of Li’s bars, Horsefeather, saw its parklets vandalized with graffiti earlier this month
A map reveals the major businesses which have left, or plan to leave, San Francisco in recent months
The city has also struggled for years with rampant fentanyl use and fatal overdoses, and is on pace for its deadliest year yet.
In the first five months of 2023, preliminary reports show there were 346 overdose deaths in the city – an increase of more than 40 percent from the same period in 2022.
Economists have warned the city is spiraling into an ‘urban doom loop’ – a vicious circle of interconnected trends and forces that send cities into economic and social ruin.
High theft has proved a problem in the area recently, with a Walgreens in the city center resolving to chaining their freezers to stop shoplifters.
Over the past few months, dozens of retailers announced they would be vacating the downtown area of the city.
Retail stalwart Old Navy announced they would be shuttering their flagship store in the area last month, becoming the latest chain to exit the city.
It comes after retail giant Nordstrom announced they would be closing all of their locations in the city.
The company said that due to the ‘changing dynamics’ of San Francisco it would be shuttering all remaining stores in the next few months.
In April, Whole Foods announced it was closing all their locations, with Anthropologie and Office Depot having also made the same decisions.
These stores joined the growing list of stores that have abandoned the coastal city, including H&M, Marshall’s, Gap and Banana Republic.
A disturbing recent report showed 95 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the COVID pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent.
Out of 203 retailers open in 2019 in the city’s Union Square area, just 107 are still operating, a drop of 47 percent in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.
