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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Shaku\u2019s assessment of drug use among the homeless is widely shared. Asked if she does drugs, a formerly homeless woman, just placed in a city-subsidized single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel, responds incredulously: \u201cIs that a trick question?\u201d A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial area outside downtown, says: \u201cEveryone out here has done something\u2014drugs, you name it.\u201d On Sutter Avenue, a wizened 50-year-old named Jeff slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 AM<\/span>, one hand holding a sweet roll, the other playing with his beard. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. \u201cI use drugs, alcohol, all of it,\u201d he tells me, his eyes closed, as a pair of smiling German tourists deposit a peach on his blanket. Last night it was speed, he says, which has left him just a \u201clittle bit high\u201d this morning. \u201cThe whole Tenderloin is for drugs,\u201d Jeff observes, before nodding off again.<\/span><\/p>\n A<\/span>n inadequate supply of affordable housing is not the first thing that comes to mind when conversing with San Francisco\u2019s street denizens. Their behavioral problems\u2014above all, addiction and mental illness\u2014are too obvious. Forty-two percent of respondents in the city\u2019s 2019 street poll of the homeless reported chronic drug or alcohol use; the actual percentage is likely higher. The city relentlessly sends the message that drug use is not only acceptable but fully expected. Users dig for veins in plain view on the sidewalk; health authorities distribute more than 4.5 million syringes a year, along with Vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, alcohol swabs, and instructions on how to best tie one\u2019s arm for a \u201chit.\u201d Needle disposal boxes have been erected outside the city\u2019s public toilets, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life. Only 60 percent of the city\u2019s free needles get returned; many of the rest litter the sidewalks and streets or are flushed down toilets.<\/span><\/p>\n The city dispenses free needles to addicts, who often dispose of them, still filled with heroin and blood, on the streets. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Curious to test the Hondurans\u2019 threshold of suspicion, I made repeated inquiries along Hyde Street about the going rate for a dose of fentanyl, the city\u2019s 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. \u201cHey, baby, remember me!\u201d my seller crooned as he handed me the packet.<\/span><\/p>\n Further down Hyde, a 36-year-old man in a plaid shirt, with sandy hair and blue eyes, sat on the sidewalk slouched against a car as he searched unsuccessfully for a vein in his right wrist. Switching to his left hand, he managed to draw blood into the syringe, marking a vein. I asked him to verify that I was indeed sold fentanyl. Was I a cop? he asked, accepting my response at face value. He would have to taste my purchase to confirm its authenticity, he said, honorably breaking off just a few grains rather than popping the whole pill in his mouth. (His forbearance was wise: at two grams, the pellet could have been lethal if ingested all at once, depending on its purity.) \u201cCan I ask you how much you paid?\u201d the addict asked groggily. \u201cMotherfucker!\u201d he burst out when told. \u201cYou\u2019d ordinarily get much less than that for 20 fucking dollars. It\u2019s because you\u2019re new.\u201d The junkie, originally from Seattle, begged for my stash so he could sell it to his own customers or take it himself. \u201cIf I was sober, I wouldn\u2019t want you to give it to me,\u201d he said, \u201cbut my problem now is that I only have five fucking dollars and I want to go to Big 5 [a sporting-goods store] because someone stole my backpack.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The brazenness of the narcotics scene has worsened since the passage of Proposition 47, another milestone in the ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order. The 2014 state ballot initiative downgraded a host of drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. (See \u201cThe Decriminalization Delusion<\/strong><\/span><\/a>,\u201d Autumn 2015.) Local prosecutors and judges, already disinclined to penalize the drug trade so as to avoid contributing to \u201cmass incarceration,\u201d are even less willing to initiate a case or see it through when it is presented as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. San Francisco officers complain that drug dealers are getting neither jail time nor probation. Drug courts have closed in some California cities, reports the Washington Post<\/i>, because police have lost the threat of prison time to induce addicted sellers like the Seattle man into treatment. The number of clients in San Francisco drug court dropped from 296 in 2014 to 185 in 2018, a decline of over 37 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n M<\/span>ental illness is the other obvious condition afflicting the homeless that makes the question of affordable housing secondary. Thirty-nine percent of the homeless polled in the 2019 street survey said that they suffered from psychiatric conditions; the actual percentage is probably higher. Outside the Red Coach Motor Hotel on Eddy Street, a small, dusty man in a white T-shirt is waving his arms in the middle of the street, his pants hanging down, smartphone in hand. He yells at passersby: \u201cI\u2019m too fucking polite, fuck you, you take my kindness for weakness. I don\u2019t know why you\u2019re laughing at me. I don\u2019t feel that way about women, but I\u2019m the bitch!\u201d After lunging toward me, he wheels around and continues up Polk Street, screaming and gesticulating. Two male tourists from Greece, who landed in San Francisco just hours before, observe: \u201cWe don\u2019t have so many problems in Greece.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cdisagreement\u201d with a teller; Bank of America is also off limits, after he got into a \u201cdisagreement\u201d with a manager who insulted him in Hebrew, he says. He is barred from a local shelter for getting into yet another \u201cdisagreement,\u201d this one with someone who stole his diver\u2019s 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\u2019t 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: \u201cBecause I love this place! San Francisco is an international, tolerant, peace-loving community that is often imitated but never duplicated.\u201d He appreciates the leeway given him for his lifestyle. \u201cIf I lay down like this in Fremont?\u201d he asks rhetorically, referring to a city across the East Bay. It is questionable whether Timothy\u2019s presence on the streets is conducive to public safety.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s tourist-friendly waterfront. \u201cAnyone 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,\u201d 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 \u201ccriminalizing homelessness.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In October 2015, three gutter punks\u2014youth who roam up and down the West Coast colonizing the sidewalks and panhandling\u2014robbed and shot to death a 23-year-old Canadian woman in Golden Gate Park and killed a 67-year-old man a few days later after stealing his car. They were high on meth. The incident appears to have produced no perturbations in San Francisco\u2019s thinking or policy. In August 2019, a 25-year-old homeless addict viciously attacked a woman entering her Embarcadero apartment, after demanding that she let him inside so that he could kill the \u201crobot\u201d\u2014a female concierge\u2014at the reception desk. The presiding judge initially refused repeated requests to hold the suspect in pretrial detention. The San Francisco supervisors may be unwilling to back policies that would help prevent such violence, but they have<\/i> found time to ban city agencies from stigmatizing the perpetrators of such violence by using words like \u201cfelon\u201d or \u201coffender.\u201d Under language guidelines passed in August 2019, criminals and ex-cons will henceforth be known as \u201cjustice-involved\u201d persons or \u201creturning residents.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n T<\/span>he elderly poor, in particular, suffer from the city\u2019s surrender to street lawlessness. Crescent Manor is a beautifully restored Beaux-Arts SRO for seniors and the mentally disabled; murals of bathing beauties, flying ducks, and fish grace its lobby. The residence lies across from the headquarters of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco\u2019s most fearsome advocacy group. Say this for the Coalition: it lives by its principles. Outside its red door is a rancid encampment of umbrellas, lawn chairs, tarps, and backpacks. An obese woman sits on an overturned bucket, her bare buttocks hanging over the side; other women lean against the building\u2019s wall, nodding off; a man walks by with his pants falling off. Someone spits on the sidewalk. The Crescent Manor day clerk gestures toward the throng. \u201cSee these dudes out here shooting up without a care in world? Our elderly are scared to go out. They don\u2019t know what kind of drugs these people are on. They don\u2019t like people leaning up against our building. Our seniors pay rent. It doesn\u2019t matter how much they pay\u2014they pay rent.\u201d But elderly tenants apparently have less clout than street vagrants in San Francisco. (In August 2019, the Coalition announced that it had lost its lease and would be moving a few blocks down Turk Street, where it will undoubtedly attract another encampment.)<\/span><\/p>\n San Francisco\u2019s encampments generate up to six tons of trash daily. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n The city enables the entire homeless lifestyle, not just drug use. Free food is everywhere. Outreach workers roam the city, handing out beef jerky, crackers, and other snacks. At the encampment across from Glide Memorial Church, a wiry man in a blue denim jacket announces that day\u2019s lunch selection at the church\u2019s feeding line, to general approbation: fried chicken. He triumphantly brandishes a half-eaten leg before tossing it into the street. Susan, a 57-year-old Canadian who lives in an encampment on Willow Alley, itemizes the available bounty while rolling a cigarette: free dinners and movies; the microwave ovens at Whole Foods; free water at Starbucks. The homeless position themselves outside coffee shops in the morning for handouts of pastries and java. If those handouts don\u2019t materialize, there\u2019s always theft. A barista at the Bush and Van Ness Starbucks says that someone steals food and coffee at least every other day. \u201cWe are not allowed to do anything about it,\u201d she says. \u201cThe policy is we can\u2019t chase them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The city\u2019s biannual homeless survey claims that \u201cfood insecurity\u201d is a pressing problem, but the homeless don\u2019t act like food-deprived people. Uneaten comestibles litter the sidewalks and gutters. A typical deposit of detritus outside an office building on Turk and Market includes an unopened one-pound bag of California walnuts, a box of uneaten pastries, an empty brandy bottle, a huge black lace bra, a dirty yellow teddy bear, one high-heeled red suede boot, and a brown suede jacket. A dapper man named Ralph has appointed himself the unofficial cleaner of the block where Glide Memorial Church sits. He has never seen anyone throw something in the trash, rather than toss it on the ground. \u201cThey\u2019re not interested in doing anything for themselves,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n T<\/span>he homeless are also wired. Most vagrants have smartphones, which they use to barter goods. They use free Wi-Fi or steal passcodes. In the entrance to San Francisco\u2019s central library on Civic Center Plaza, a bent man with a bike repeatedly tries to plug his phone into an outlet while muttering incoherently. A sign announces that the outlet is not working. Two patrol guards politely try to direct him inside the library, but he wanders off, still muttering. \u201cI offered to have him use an outlet inside; his time could have been better spent finding one that works,\u201d one of the guards sighs.<\/span><\/p>\n The combination of maximal tolerance for antisocial behavior, on the one hand, and free services and food, on the other, acts as a magnet. \u201cSan Francisco is the place to go if you live on the streets,\u201d observes Jeff, the 50-year-old wino and drug addict. \u201cThere are more resources\u2014showers, yeah, and housing.\u201d A 31-year-old named Rose arrived in San Francisco from Martinez, northeast of the city, four years ago, trailing a long criminal record. She came for the benefits, including Vivitrol to dull the effect of opiates, she says woozily, standing outside a huge green tent and pink bike at Golden Gate and Hyde, surrounded by the Hondurans.<\/span><\/p>\n Suggesting that some of the homeless are making a choice is heresy in official circles. Longtime San Francisco pol Bevan Dufty, formerly director of the Mayor\u2019s Office of Housing Opportunities, Partnerships and Engagement, now president of the BART board of directors, says that it is \u201cB.S.\u201d to call people service-resistant. \u201cThe lies that people tell are disgusting\u2014\u2018people don\u2019t want services,\u2019 \u2018they come here to be homeless.\u2019 These lies are to make you blame the victim.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Actually, it\u2019s the homeless themselves who suggest that their condition has a large voluntary component. Jeff has been offered housing by numerous outreach workers and could come off the streets if he wanted to, he says. A man standing outside the city\u2019s latest shelter prototype, known as a Navigation Center, says that he was offered housing four times but always turned it down. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I didn\u2019t want to give up drugs, but I could\u2019ve went in way before now.\u201d Vanessa, a heavily mascaraed trans woman, came from Denver a year ago at the invitation of a friend because \u201ceveryone comes here,\u201d she says. Though she has been attacked and her tents burned, she still lives at the Willow Alley encampment rather than accepting housing. Her fellow camper Susan explains: \u201cTeams come to talk to us, but they can only do so much.\u201d Susan has been taken to a Navigation Center, but it felt like a jail, she says: \u201cI\u2019m claustrophobic.\u201d In fact, the Navigation Centers are designed to be maximally accommodating. Residents can come and go as they please, order meals at any time of the day, and bring their pets, partners, and possessions (known in shelter parlance as the Three Ps).<\/span><\/p>\n A bike patrol officer in Union Square confirms the challenge of persuading people to get off the streets. Belying the advocates\u2019 characterization of the police as oppressors, he approaches an encampment on Powell Street as a supplicant. \u201cGood morning, ma\u2019am. It\u2019s 8:45 AM<\/span>. Rise and shine! Y\u2019all need any resources from me?\u201d Doris, a short 51-year-old with greasy gray hair, a leather jacket, and white sneakers, asks in blurred syllables for a few more minutes to sleep, which the officer grants. \u201cYou try to help, but the majority of time, people refuse,\u201d he says. As Doris stuffs dirty comforters, cell-phone chargers, and cookies into a stolen trash bin, she observes: \u201cI\u2019m going to be honest: some of us are so addicted, we are so into our addictions, that we end up being comfortable being homeless.\u201d Doris estimates that she spends $40 a day on crack, vodka, and other substances. She adds penitently: \u201cBut we need to start respecting our neighbors and stop littering.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The advocates\u2019 fallback position to their \u201cservice resistance is a lie\u201d conceit is that services have to be \u201crelevant to where people are,\u201d which means that services should come with no rules or restrictions. It is not for the people destroying the social compact, however, to decide whether they will deign to accept the help that taxpayers are offering, when refusing that help destroys everyone else\u2019s quality of life. Up and down the West Coast, Third World diseases associated with lack of sanitation\u2014including typhoid, typhus, and hepatitis A\u2014are breaking out in and around encampments. In 2018, San Francisco officials received more than 80 calls a day reporting human feces on sidewalks and thoroughfares. The city\u2019s encampments generate up to six tons of trash daily, including needles still loaded with heroin and blood. The stench of the streets lingers in the nostrils for hours.<\/span><\/p>\n Elevating the alleged rights of the homeless over those of the working public has cost billions in government outlays, with nothing to show for it. Mayors have come and gone; agencies have been renamed, task forces convened, ten-year plans rolled out, and section chiefs, liaison officers, and operations-support teams added to existing bureaucracies and seeded into new ones, while the \u201cunsheltered\u201d count continues to rise\u2014up 17 percent from 2017 to 2019 alone, to 8,011. San Francisco continues to puzzle over the reason. Is it lack of city-created affordable housing, as the advocates and politicians maintain? No other American city has built as much affordable housing per capita, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. From 2004 to 2014, the city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive housing, which comes with drug counseling and social workers. More have been constructed since then, and thousands more are in the works, along with more shelter beds.<\/span><\/p>\n Is San Francisco not spending enough generally, as the advocates and politicians maintain? Its main homelessness agency\u2014currently dubbed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and dedicated to an allegedly novel mission: \u201chelping homeless residents permanently exit the streets\u201d\u2014commands a $285 million budget. Add health services and sanitation, and you get a $380 million annual tab for homelessness, according to the city\u2019s budget analyst. That figure is wildly under the mark, leaving out criminal-justice costs, welfare payments, and repairing infrastructure deterioration, among other expenditures. But even assuming the conservative $380 million, that works out to $47,500 a year per homeless person.<\/span><\/p>\n S<\/span>o what have been the missing elements in this flood of spending? A commitment to a single standard of behavior for all and an insistence that rights carry with them reciprocal responsibilities. San Francisco\u2019s response to crimes against the public order has been fleeting, at best. The most sustained period of enforcement came under Mayor Frank Jordan, a former city police chief, in the early 1990s. (See \u201cSan Francisco Gets Tough with the Homeless<\/a>,\u201d Autumn 1994.) An initiative called Matrix paired police officers with social workers to try to coax the homeless into shelter and housing; the police enforced 18 quality-of-life laws against such behaviors as aggressive panhandling, loitering, and public drug sales. Matrix initially targeted a large encampment in Civic Center Plaza, but the public response was so positive that the program spread citywide. Shelter- and service-resistance were already evident, however; only a small fraction of the homeless accepted shelter or remained housed.<\/span><\/p>\n San Francisco\u2019s progressive self-image soon trumped common sense, and in 1996, at the urging of the Coalition on Homelessness, voters turned Jordan out of city hall in favor of former state assembly speaker Willie Brown. Brown had run on a compassion platform, but he soon came to repudiate it, observing with amazement that many of the homeless didn\u2019t actually want to come off the streets. Since then, most enforcement initiatives have proved abortive. In 2010, voters passed an ordinance allowing police officers to cite people on their own recognizance for blocking sidewalks and streets. It has rarely been used. (See \u201cThe Sidewalks of San Francisco<\/strong><\/span><\/a>,\u201d Autumn 2010.)<\/span><\/p>\n In 2016, voters defied the Coalition on Homelessness again and approved Proposition Q, which allowed sanitation workers to clear encampments after a 24-hour notice and an offer of shelter. It, too, went largely unused until supervisor Mark Farrell, installed as an interim mayor in January 2018, vowed to start applying it. \u201cYou can offer services, you can offer shelter and housing to people and at a certain point, as a city we need to draw the line and say \u2018this is a service-resistant population, we need to take down those tent encampments because they are unhealthy for the entire city of San Francisco,\u2019 \u201d he said in 2018. Farrell was succeeded as mayor by London Breed in July 2018, however, and the Prop. Q power returned to limbo status.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet evidence has been abundant that law enforcement restores civic order. Before the 2016 Super Bowl, then-mayor Ed Lee announced that the homeless were simply \u201cgoing to have to leave. . . . We\u2019ll give you an alternative. We are always going to be supportive. But you are going to have to leave the streets.\u201d And for the relevant period, the streets downtown were markedly cleaner. In spring 2018, a viral video of flagrant drug use in the Powell Street subway station prompted the authorities to increase police patrols there. The monthly tally of needles picked up by BART cleaners in the station dropped from 1,519 in July 2018 to 166 in May 2019, according to the San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>, and the drug scene there has abated. (Part of the drop in the needle count may be due to the increasing popularity of fentanyl, which can be smoked.) In April 2019, BART began posting more officers inside transit stations to deter the rampant farebeating that was costing taxpayers $25 million to $35 million annually and enabling a large homeless population in the subway system. Ticket sales rose 10 percent, police calls fell 50 percent, and 30 percent more riders put value on their existing cards, belying the claim that beleaguered turnstile jumpers are simply too poor to pay. Areas of new development in San Francisco, like Mission Bay, home to several new hospitals, have not had a vagrancy problem because vagrancy has not been tolerated there.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/needles-on-division-street.jpg\")
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