Potemkin village, in its original meaning: any of a number of fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great.
The term has also come to be used to describe an elaborate facade designed to hide an undesirable reality.
Remember when San Francisco had degenerated from a beautiful, desirable city/tourist mecca to a disgusting, tent-city/drug market/shoplifters’ paradise, with feces and drug paraphernalia littering the streets?
Remember when Governor Gavin Newsom made sure the city was all cleaned up and looking like it used to for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which took place from November 11 to 17th? The tent cities were gone, the streets cleaned, etc.?
Well that November. This is December. How about now?
From Madeline Coggins’ article for foxbusiness.com:
Less than a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, San Francisco is reverting to a den of homelessness and drugs, according to locals.
“It’s recognizable. San Francisco, same as before. Anyone they pushed out of important zones has just slowly crept right back in,” Crossfit Golden Gate Gym owner Danielle Rabkin said on “Varney & Co” Tuesday.
Despite the clean-up efforts, Golden Gate City has gone back to “business as usual,” leaving business owners like Rabkin to deal with a “tremendously difficult” reality.
“I have vagrants lying in front of the business all the time,” the gym owner said. “It’s unpleasant. People don’t want to live here.”
“I think that’s the number one thing that potential customers and customers from the past have left. People don’t want to live in a city that’s this expensive with such a high cost of living, in such a low quality of life. Nobody wants to be subjected to dodging human feces and needles on sidewalks and exposing their children to open-air intravenous drug use. It’s really unpleasant.”
In other words, last month San Francisco was turned into a potemkin village for APEC – especially for Chinese “President” (tell me about the free elections that made him one, I dare you) xi jinping.
And now that APEC is over and xi jinping is gone? Straight back to reality – the reality that Gavin Newsom – former Mayor of San Francisco and now Governor of California – was so instrumental in creating. The reality that is driving businesses, and residents, out of not just San Francisco, but Los Angeles, San Diego and other formerly desirable California cities.
San Franpotemkincisco. It may be a little overlong versus the original spelling. But if you want truth in describing what this city was, what it became last month, and what it again is now, that’s the shortest version I could come up with.
