San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

[Valin]

City Journal

Failure to enforce basic standards of public behavior has made one of America’s great cities increasingly unlivable.

Heather Mac Donald

Autumn 2019

Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-felon named Shaku explains as he rips open a blue Popsicle wrapper with his teeth. Shaku is standing in an encampment of tents, trash, and bicycles, across from San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church. Another encampment-dweller lights a green crack pipe and passes it around. A few paces down the street, a gaunt man swipes a credit card through a series of parking meters to see if it has been reported stolen yet.

For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless. The results have been the opposite: street squalor and misery have increased, even as government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles that have guided the city’s homelessness policy remain inviolate: homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

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Drug sellers are as shameless as drug users. Hondurans have dominated the drug trade in the Tenderloin and around Civic Center Plaza and Union Square since the 1990s. They congregate up to a dozen a corner, openly counting and recounting large wads of cash, completing transactions with no attempt at concealment. Most of the dealers are illegal aliens. One might think that city leaders would be only too happy to hand them off to federal immigration authorities, but the political imperative to safeguard illegal aliens against deportation takes precedence over public order. Local law enforcement greets any announced federal crackdown on criminal aliens with alarm.

Curious to test the Hondurans’ threshold of suspicion, I made repeated inquiries along Hyde Street about the going rate for a dose of fentanyl, the city’s up-and-coming drug of choice. To get a quote, I would have to show the money, I was told. I offered $8, not wanting to overpay, and was directed down the block. At the corner of Hyde and Golden Gate, steps away from the UC Hastings law school, I struck a deal at $16. The seller took the cash halfway up the block and exchanged it with a skinny, bare-chested man covered with tattoos, who handed him a small Ziploc bag containing a crumbly white pellet. “Hey, baby, remember me!” my seller crooned as he handed me the packet.

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Mental illness is not always so overt. A man in a Stanford University sweatshirt is lying on a grimy apricot-colored blanket on Van Ness Avenue, eyes closed, mechanically putting pieces of muffin into his mouth. Realizing that he is being observed, he sits up, centers his sunglasses on his head, and reaches for a pack of Pall Malls. Timothy, 47, says he served time in a Texas hospital for the criminally insane, following a domestic violence incident. He has been banned for life from banking with Wells Fargo after getting into a “disagreement” with a teller; Bank of America is also off limits, after he got into a “disagreement” with a manager who insulted him in Hebrew, he says. He is barred from a local shelter for getting into yet another “disagreement,” this one with someone who stole his diver’s watch. He is on probation for attacking a health worker in the San Francisco Veterans Administration hospital. He was recently in jail for brandishing a loaded BB gun in a Red Lobster restaurant. At present, however, he is affable and well-spoken. Asked why he doesn’t move to a cheaper housing market, where his $1,100 monthly VA benefits and eligibility for a large VA home loan would go far, he responds: “Because I love this place! San Francisco is an international, tolerant, peace-loving community that is often imitated but never duplicated.” He appreciates the leeway given him for his lifestyle. “If I lay down like this in Fremont?” he asks rhetorically, referring to a city across the East Bay. It is questionable whether Timothy’s presence on the streets is conducive to public safety.

When the mentally ill abuse drugs, their risk of violence increases. But assault seems to have been normalized in San Francisco, at least when committed by the homeless. Wallace Lee is part of a neighborhood coalition trying to stop the placement of a shelter on the Embarcadero, the city’s tourist-friendly waterfront. “Anyone who has lived in San Francisco for five years has either been attacked by a homeless person or has a friend who has been attacked,” he says. Members of his protest group have stopped mentioning such assaults in public hearings, however, since doing so brings on accusations that they are “criminalizing homelessness.”

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The stories that the homeless tell about their lives reveal that something far more complex than a housing shortage is at work. The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime, and chaotic child-rearing. Behind this chaos lies the dissolution of those traditional social structures that once gave individuals across the economic spectrum the ability to withstand setbacks and lead sober, self-disciplined lives: marriage, parents who know how to parent, and conventional life scripts that create purpose and meaning. There are few policy levers to change this crisis of meaning in American culture. What is certain is that the ongoing crusade to normalize drug use, along with the absence of any public encouragement of temperance, will further handicap this unmoored population.

The viability of cities should not be held hostage to solving social breakdown. Carving out a zone of immunity from the law and bourgeois norms for a perceived victim class destroys the quality of urban existence. As important, that immunity consigns its alleged beneficiaries to lives of self-abasement and marginality. Tolerating street vagrancy is a choice that cities make; for the public good, in San Francisco and elsewhere, that choice should be unmade.

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[Valin]

San Francisco’s False Solution

By doubling its homeless-services budget, the city is treating the symptom, not the problem.

Erica Sandberg

October 10, 2019

San Francisco’s radical Left has a peculiar partner in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. As a backer of Proposition C, he joined the Coalition on Homelessness to strong-arm high-revenue businesses into supporting bloated city government departments to address the city’s homeless problem. Companies earning gross receipts over $50 million now pay an additional tax on the excess, with rates ranging from 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent. It will garner the city between $250 and $300 million, doubling its current budget for homeless services to half a billion dollars annually.

Prop C, dubbed the “Our City, Our Home Fund,” passed in November of 2018 with 61 percent of the vote. Since then it’s been hotly contested. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has sued the city. “Approval for special taxes needs a two-thirds majority, so it’s now in the appeals process,” says senior staff attorney Laura Dougherty. “We need the clarity of the California Supreme court.” Meantime, the tax revenue is being collected, but the city is holding the funds until it gets the nod to spend them.

If you believe that lack of funding is the cause of San Francisco’s homelessness problem, then the measure is a great idea. Fifty percent of the funding would go toward housing, 25 percent to mental health and addiction programs, 15 percent to people who are at risk of becoming homeless or have recently become so, and 10 percent to short-term “residential shelters and hygiene programs.”

It won’t help. The plan is wildly expensive. After administrative costs are skimmed from the top, the remainder will be distributed among the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and the Department of Public Health. Combined, these agencies employ hundreds of government workers, whose average compensation (salary and benefits) is $175,004. The city will then parcel out the rest to dozens of non-profit agencies, each with its own set of directors and employees. Just how much is left for those they purportedly serve remains to be seen, but chances are it won’t be enough.

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