Most Americans have a cartoonish understanding of evil. They think it comes with red skin, horns and a pitchfork, but it doesn’t. Evil usually manifests in the form of middle-aged men with non-threatening demeanors, wearing suits while regurgitating rhetoric approved by a team of advisors whose entire job is to find ways to make corporate rhetoric palatable to the public.
But sometimes wealth can leave you disconnected from the public, and not knowing certain institutions are deeply unpopular, naturally exposing a rift between politicians, corporate interests and the general population.
Daniel Lurie had such a moment when speaking at an event promoting tourism in San Francisco. During his speech he gushed over the COO of Blackstone, Jon Gray, who he mistakenly called the CEO, and recounted a story of the executive walking along the San Francisco Embarcadero, urging real estate investors to buy property in San Francisco.
The private equity firm is doing more than endorsing — they’re investing in San Francisco to the tune of $130 million in a deal to acquire to the city’s Four Seasons Hotel.
Gray’s endorsement of the city’s current trajectory is the class equivalent of Satan broadcasting to every demon in existence that San Francisco is the new hot spot for economic Armageddon. Blackstone, with the help of their cheerleader, Daniel Lurie, seems poised to turn the counterculture capital of California into America’s eviction epicenter.
That may sound hyperbolic, but I don’t give a fuck. While their purchase isn’t residential, one may wonder why I am so alarmed. I’m alarmed because it’s Blackstone, and Blackstone’s entire mission is to squeeze as much blood from tenants as possible. They’re basically Dracula with an investment portfolio the size of a European country’s GDP, and yet they’re still thirsty. If this investment goes well, what’s to stop them from expanding their presence into San Francisco’s rental market?
San Francisco already suffers from hyper-gentrification, exorbitant rent prices and leadership that seems more interested in courting Silicon Valley and their fake A.I. startups than considering the needs of their constituents. Blackstone-style corporate capture of the already brutal Bay Area rental market is a knife twist in a near fatal wound.
Blackstone is Literally What is Wrong with the World
Look at Blackstone’s history to understand their intent. The private equity giant isn’t new to California real estate. Blackstone currently owns upwards of 60 apartment buildings in San Diego, and have raised the rents on all of them. Some rent hikes are as much as double the market average in San Diego.
What they’ve done in San Diego follows a long pattern of predatory behavior from Blackstone.
Blackstone purchased significant rental properties in Denmark and raised the rents after small renovations. The rent hikes were so egregious that Denmark passed a law colloquially known as the “Blackstone law” to prohibit businesses from engaging in similar unethical business practices.
Tenants in Blackstone portfolio properties were so desperate to combat unfair rent increases that they formed a union to address it.
Blackstone was sued when one of its portfolio companies, Packers Sanitation, was caught using child labor.
There’s more, but you get the gist.
Do you really think they’d be any different in San Francisco? And why would Daniel Lurie support that kind of abuse for the people he’s supposed to represent? Because, despite the cute social media videos where he stands in front of things he had no part in creating, inadvertently taking credit for their success in an attempt to placate San Franciscans into thinking this corporate shill is doing a good job.
And to be fair, Daniel Lurie is doing a good job for corporate interests. Not for you. Lurie’s administration has been a gift to corporations. Everything from cutting MUNI service while simultaneously opening up Market Street to autonomous vehicles, to filling his transition team with tech CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris and Doordash CEO Tony Xu, among others who continue to advise the mayor.
I’m not impressed with Daniel Lurie as a Mayor, but I don’t think he ever intended to be a Mayor in anything other than name. He’s San Francisco’s CEO, and he has a job to do, but I’m not sure it has anything to do with you.
