Charles Barkley Ripped San Francisco, The Site Of Next Year's NBA All Star Game, Hard On Last Night's Telecast, Calling It A City "Full Of Homeless Crooks". And People Aren't Happy Today

Dante2/19/2024 10:00 PM

Chuck: “Hey Reggie(miller), if you had a chance to be in the cold, or being around a bunch of homeless crooks, what would you choose?”

Miller: “We love San Fran…”

Barkley: “No we don’t. You can’t even walk around.”

Miller: “Yes you can.”

Barkley: “Yeah, with a bulletproof vest and security."

USA Today - But during TNT’s telecast of the game, Barkley instead appeared on the TruTV “alt-cast” with Taylor Rooks and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green.
TNT briefly had the “alt-cast” on the TNT feed, however, and Barkley quickly took an unnecessary and classless jab at San Francisco — the city that will host the 2025 NBA All-Star Game.
You can hear his comments for yourself but it was a bad look for TNT:
These comments were uncalled for and fans (and his fellow broadcasters) were not afraid to call him out for the rude and thoughtless remarks.

Imagine the drinking problems that the NBA on TNT production team must have, having to deal with Charles Barkley on a live microphone every night they work? Talk about stress.

Not that I even disagree with him here, or most the time, as I think the old Chuckster usually tells it how it is. But in the sense that you've always gotta be on edge, finger on the dump button, ready to throw it to Kenny and hit mach speed into a commercial break.

Not possible however when throwing it to the "alt feed" they had on last night. Which I love by the way.

Nobody is watching the NBA All-Star Game when the players actually pretend to give a shit. Not like last night, where they were just blatantly wasting everybody's time. So give us something entertaining. Give us Barkley describing what everyone has to look forward to at next year's festivities in the hell hole San Francisco has devolved into. On air, in front of 4 co-hosts who became so awkward they were squirming out of their seats.

TNT. We know drama.

Instead of criticizing Barkley for commenting on such a well-known elephant in the room, maybe we should be applauding him.

Giphy Images.

Barkley's remarks bring critical social issues to the forefront. San Francisco, despite its beauty and cultural richness, faces challenges with homelessness and crime, much like many other major cities worldwide. By discussing these issues on a prominent platform, Barkley contributes to raising awareness, potentially fostering a dialogue that could lead to solutions.

Barkley's actually pretty brave if you ask me.

Giphy Images.

Speaking of brave, and speaking of San Francisco, the timing of Barkley's statements actually allowed me to dig up an old blog topic I had sitting in drafts from a few months ago when Dave Chappelle performed in San Francisco, and also, called it a shit hole.

SF Gate - For those following his career closely, they drowned out everything else, but what was crystal clear was his disdain for present-day San Francisco. Chappelle, who was at the Warriors playoff game Wednesday, fondly recounted meeting Steph Curry as a rookie. And that was just about the only good thing he had to say about the city, at a show that was announced only two days earlier.
On his last visit to Chase Center, he brought Elon Musk onstage to a chorus of boos, and the time before that, a Hall of Fame’s worth of Bay Area rappers. At this event, there were no special guests. He didn’t mention Musk. Instead, he focused on the city’s homelessness problems.
“What the fuck happened to this place?” he asked.
He told a story about eating at an Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin a few nights earlier, only to have someone defecate in front of the restaurant as he was walking in. San Francisco has become “half ‘Glee,’ half zombie movie,” he said, and he remarked that the whole city is the Tenderloin now. “Y’all need a Batman!” he exclaimed.

San Franciscans are a unique bunch.

As Donnie can attest, they are very prideful of their city, and will not hesitate to defend it, tooth and nail.

They're also quick to point out that since you're not from there, you have no idea what you're talking about.

You would think somebody like Dave Chappelle, who tours the world, hopping city to city on a daily basis would be a fair judge of what's what, but I guess not.

Personally, I fucking love(d) San Francisco.

Their Little Italy, North Beach, is gorgeous. It's mostly northern Italian immigrant descendants, which also explains in part why nearby Napa is one of the planet's greatest wine-growing regions.

They've got some A+ restaurants there, Original Joe's and La Ciccia being two of my favorites anywhere in the country. And they're home to Tony's Pizzeria which may have the best pizza west of New York in the United States.

The Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood is one of the best places to visit, with incredible restaurants and tons of fun drinking spots.

The weather is stunning, and the views from atop some of those hills and parks, out over the marine layer and into the Pacific are top-notch.

And also, my favorite two people in the world, Nancy and Paul Pelosi, have like ten monster-sized houses there.

But for as much as I love my own city I live in to death, Chicago, I'm also not delusional enough to bury my head in the sand and deny the obvious.

For as amazing as San Francisco used to be, it's hurting. Bad. Facts are facts. And they aren't good.

San Francisco used to be king of the hill not just in terms of general real estate in the United States, with residential prices fetching ungodly amounts of money, but commercial and office space as well.

If you were living and working in San Francisco, or owned a business, you were flush.

Or doing anything it took to get by because you just had to live there.

Not always the case anymore.

WSJ - Before the pandemic, San Francisco’s California Street was home to some of the world’s most valuable commercial real estate. The corridor runs through the heart of the city’s financial district and is lined with offices for banks and other companies that help fuel the global tech economy.
One building, a 22-story glass and stone tower at 350 California Street, was worth around $300 million in 2019, according to office broker estimates.
That building now is for sale, with bids due soon. They are expected to come in at about $60 million, commercial real-estate brokers say. That’s an 80% decline in value in just four years.
This is how dire things have become in San Francisco, an extreme form of a challenge nationwide. Nearly every large U.S. city is struggling, to some degree, with reduced office-worker turnout since the pandemic spurred remote work. No market was hit harder than San Francisco, for reasons including its high costs, reliance on a tech industry quick to embrace hybrid work, and quality-of-life issues such as crime and homelessness.
Many of the city’s most prominent corporate tenants, from Salesforce Inc. to Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., are flooding the office market with space for sublet rather than waiting for their leases to expire. The lack of office workers is rippling throughout the financial district, leading restaurants, retailers and other small businesses to lay off employees or close.

That was just the biggest headline grabber from the past year. From the looks of the Wall St. Journal, it seems pretty rampant citywide.

I don't know what issue is a bigger deal, the poop everywhere or the bottom falling out in the real estate market. Maybe they go hand in hand?

Nearly 30% of San Francisco’s office space is vacant, which is more than seven times the rate before the pandemic hit, and the biggest increase of any major U.S. city, according to commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group Inc.
Regardless of the building’s specific issues, a sale as low as the bids some brokers expect would be bad news for office owners in other U.S. cities too, said Mark Fawer, a partner in the real estate practice group at law firm Greenspoon Marder.
“This could be seen as a bellwether for the value destruction in the urban office market nationally,” he said, “especially those markets that are more technology and financial services-centric.”
San Francisco’s dependence on the tech industry, for years a strength, has become a weakness. With young workforces and break-the-mold corporate cultures, tech companies like Dropbox Inc. and Yelp Inc. announced shifts toward more remote work and needing less office space.
One company’s policy on returning to work has particularly stung—that of Salesforce. CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose grandfather served on the city Board of Supervisors, was a public advocate for a special tax to assist the homeless that many other businesses opposed.

And if you want to look at a real journalistic and media outlet with the utmost integrity, look at the articles about San Francisco that have been published around here lately-

I present you

I think you get the point.

So back to Barkley. I think he actually deserves credit for not going full blown Chappelle last night on air, yelling at Reggie that San Fran is down so bad it needs Batman. Which I think it's abundantly clear from the things pointed out in this blog alone, (poop squads, pirates, etc.) that it does. Maybe we can send him there just as soon as he's done saving Chicago.

charles barkley + 2 Tags

Dante2/19/2024 10:00 PM