Between crime and the mentally ill, businesses are closing all over the Country.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today is John chachis the founder and managing director a Methuselah Advisors. Well, who the heck are they? Well, he is a media professional, knowing what the heck is going on in the media.

0:14 Speaker 3 And you ran for senate.

0:15 Speaker 2 In Nevada a long time ago, That’s right, I did. I was a primary candidate for a senate se or just a businessman like you. I own businesses.

0:23 Speaker 3 Now, John, you are concerned.

0:25 Speaker 1 We had a we caught each other in the elevated the other day and you told me about your concern about what’s going on in America’s cities, and I said, come on the radio, because your concerns are my concerns and America’s concerns.

0:43 Speaker 3 Give us a I’ll give you the simple one simple.

0:46 Speaker 2 One of the businesses that my family owns is in San Francisco. It’s been there one hundred and sixty five years. It’s called Gumps. It’s a very well known retail name, and we have I love their chocolate. Yeah, well we have.

0:58 We have a lot of beautiful things. And the city of San Francisco today is a disaster, which everybody knows. We don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about it. I live half the time in New York City, where I have a different business. Everybody who stopped going to work has torn the fabric of the way these

1:15 cities function. And until that’s fixed, we’ve got big problems, big big problems.

1:21 Speaker 1 And of our large cities that have big problems, I know, San Francisco has got to be on top of it.

1:28 Speaker 3 Tell us how bad San Francisco is, and then go.

1:30 Speaker 2 On to me, it’s incredible. I went out to visit our store, walking from the top of Union Square down through what is the most prestigious shopping district in San Francisco, about eight blocks. I was changing sides of the street to avoid derelics, and homeless people and drug addicts. People are in front of stores, laying on the street. I mean,

1:54 it’s a disaster, and the city supervisors and the mayor of San Francisco ought to be embarrass and ought to be fired frankly for allowing the city to be in this condition. But what’s worse is when you get to the financial district of San Francisco, there are literally empty office buildings. It’s like everybody left during the pandemic and

2:13 learned they didn’t need to be in dirty, unpleasant places, and they haven’t come back. And until that fact is fixed, until businesses somehow induce their employees to come back to their offices, we’ve got real problems here in New York.

2:27 In the building where you and I are on Monday and Friday, you might have one hundred people that swipe their cart out of twenty seven hundred people in this building. And so the pizza shop, the restaurant, all the small businesses that surround these businesses in Midtown Manhattan, they can’t survive.

2:41 Speaker 3 And nobody’s well, you can’t survive even worse.

2:43 Speaker 1 You know, Manhattan has an additional problem. Well maybe not an additional because I haven’t been in San Francisco. It’s Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. It’s the restaurant’s as busy as heck. Guess what happens Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. There is nobody here.

2:59 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the city this sort of dislocation that happened on the back of COVID. Everybody’s dusted it under the carpet, like we don’t want to really talk about it. The cities are going to have to give tax incentives to businesses who change their policies and require five days a week of their employees back. I

3:18 have no other idea of how to get people back into their offices. It’s not going to work by just suggesting it to people because the pandemic trained people to not be here, and the more progressive and more left leaning the city is the worst.

3:30 Speaker 3 It looks.

3:31 Speaker 2 The media doesn’t want to talk about it that way. But if you go to Dallas or Salt Lake City or Nashville or cities in Florida that open back up, sure they have some problems. They have homeless challenges and lots of immigration challenges and other urban problems, but it’s nothing compared to New York and Seattle and Portland and

3:52 San Francisco. These cities that were off the end in terms of their political thinking are very in, very deep trouble. We’ll probably end up at the end of this year moving our business in San Francisco to Palo Alto or some other suburban community. It will have left San Francisco after one hundred and sixty five years. I find that atrocious.

4:11 Speaker 3 Is it dangerous for your employees?

4:15 Speaker 2 You know our employees are smart people. We haven’t run into that problem. But during periods when there have been these gangs running through through through retail organization, through retail shops in San Francisco and breaking windows and things. We’ve had to board up our store twice. We have we have a guard that’s on the inside of our store now.

4:31 But it’s the sadness of calling our customers who have come into gums. We’re literally a century and a half and we say to a lady in Marin or in a suburb, and we haven’t seen you in a year and a half, and her answer is, I don’t come to San Francisco anymore.

4:45 Speaker 1 I spoke to John condun this of Chicago, and he’s president of Columbost Funds. Now he moved from New York to back to Chicago, and Chicago a lot of companies are moving.

4:58 Speaker 2 Out similar similar profile, same kind of problem. At some point, when the fabric of urban decay makes it so the quality of life has gone to hell, your employees say, look, I don’t want to be here anymore. And once that starts, the corporations or you know, what’s their natural reaction.

5:14 Speaker 3 They move.

5:15 Speaker 1 Tom Dinanapoli was on My show last Sunday and Tom Dinanapolis the Controller of the state in New York, and he says eight boll sales tax was budgeted at seventeen billion. It was down thirty nine percent at ten billion. He doesn’t want to hit the panic button yet because he doesn’t know if it’s a it’s of a fluctuation.

5:40 Speaker 2 Oh, it’s not a fluctual.

5:42 Speaker 3 If it’s real.

5:43 Speaker 1 But if it’s down forty percent, that’s a ten billion a month or seventeen billion a month of budget. How do you make two hundred billion dollars in for the state revenue.

5:55 Speaker 2 Well, here’s a bigger one. So that’s your sales tax number. Your income tax always lags by about seven to ten months until people really know the data because we all file our taxes either in April or in October if we’re on extension. So the twenty twenty two tax data, we don’t really have it yet. We have the twenty

6:13 twenty one tax data, which was down a lot from twenty which was down from nineteen. I believe when the twenty twenty two income tax data starts to roll in, it’s always on a lag. The declines in some of these cities, it’s going to reflect the exodus of wealthy, successful people is going to be gigantic and Governor hokal

6:32 and people aren’t going to have a clue what to do about it.

6:36 Speaker 3 Well, it’s sad.

6:38 Speaker 1 Anything else you want to do, I think, John, Jack I stay on top of it because we want to have you on again in the future.

6:43 Speaker 3 And let’s keep tracking.

6:45 Speaker 2 We need a tax cut in major cities for corporations that require five day a week employees. That’s the first step. It’s going to create a bigger budget deficit, but it’s going to be the only way to induce people back to their desk. That’s the starting place.

6:58 Speaker 1 John Chacshas, thank you for keeping America informed and we’ll catch up again.

7:02 Speaker 2 Real good talk to John