A homeless encampment next to Highway 101 in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood
Posted on 04/12/2018 9:06:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
SAN FRANCISCO – “You want the down-low? I’ll give you the down-low. These guys will all tell you something different, but the one thing everyone here has in common is that they all do drugs.”
I’m talking to a group of homeless men camped out under Highway 101 in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, where a half-dozen tents are set up on a wide sidewalk across the street from a Best Buy. The thirtysomething guy who’s telling me it’s all about drugs doesn’t want to give me his name.
That’s partly because he doesn’t consider himself homeless—he stays with boyfriends, he says, and couch-surfs—and partly because he’s smoking weed with his friend, Robert Shuman, a 45-year-old self-described “homeless tweaker” who freely admits he’s homeless because he got hooked on drugs and lost everything. They’re reclining next to a large tent amid a heap of bicycles, scavenged office furniture, and a shopping cart full of food. Every few minutes, someone emerges from one of the tents and grabs something to eat. The smells of weed and urine punctuate the air.
This is one of hundreds of homeless encampments that have cropped up across San Francisco in the last few years, many in residential neighborhoods and other highly visible areas (Shuman and his friends had pitched their tents less than 50 yards from a food-truck court bustling with a lunchtime crowd.)
Homelessness has always been a feature of life in the Golden Gate City, but the encampments—and the concentrations of used needles, feces, and urine that come with them—are new. Dozens of tent camps now line freeway underpasses and sidewalks throughout the city, despite a 2016 ordinance authorizing city officials to clear them out.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
These guys were all millionaires until Trump f’d everthing up
This really exposes the void of progressive philosophy, all this “homelessness” in a historically low unemployment environment!
“San Francisco’s Homeless Encampments Expose The Failure Of A Liberal Utopia”
Nope. Wrong conclusion.
It shows the _success_ of a liberal utopia.
They’ve shown that if you want to live an unproductive life, getting by on nothing more than a tent & sleeping bag (or less) on “public” land, and having all your basic needs met thru the confiscation of profits of others, then you can. Total Leftist independence! They have triumphed over the Right’s “work or starve”, and done it in the world’s 6th largest economy.
They’re being one-upped, however, by the homeless in Seattle - who are building “homeless mansions” on premium public land (base of Space Needle), not just tents on sidewalks under overpasses.
“Success” or “failure” depends on your axioms. The Left’s aren’t ours.
These guys were all millionaires.
LOL and lived next to Bill Gates
San Francisco’s “homeless problem” is dwarfed by the “encampments” in Oakland.
Oakland has more elevated freeways and beneath all of them are literally thousands of people like the one’s described in this article. I believe, like this move against the State Government on Sanctuary Policy, the homeless issue is going to be the other issue that will finally cause the legitimate working citizens to give up on the RATs. The RATs are “invested in both illegals and homeless” because they are in the process of loosing the citizens who used to vote for them. It’s not going to happen over night, but it will happen. Even Liberals are finally getting the message about how these two issues are negatively impacting their daily lives.
Liberal proof of concepts have already been around for decades, those would be nearly every large metropolis in the USA in which they all have areas where your life would be in peril if you were lost and stumbled into them.
I had the misfortune of spending a few weeks near San Francisco’s Tenderloin district on business last year. What was most striking was the clear borders that had been drawn around the homelessness and filth. One block would be filled with garbage, needles and human excrement. I’d cross the street and find myself in a nicely kept upscale neighborhood with beautiful houses and spotless streets.
From my point of view all those miserable drug addicts are just another part of San Francisco’s planned economy. They are carefully kept in their zones and serve as a steady source of revenue through various “humanitarian” programs.
We didn’t have a homeless problem in this country while Obama was president. At least according to the news reports I saw, or lack thereof.
bttt
“The best the city can do, according to Mohammad Nuru, director of the city’s Department of Public Works, is stay in “firefighter mode”
—
Well a guy named Mohammad ought to know./s
.
[snip]This summer, the Seattle City Council found an extra $500,000 stuffed under our proverbial mattress. These funds were allocated to help the residents of Nickelsville find housing, as the council also voted to displace the camp. Local churches and housing-services groups then helped residents of Nickelsville who were moved to three different sites.
No new housing was built, no new shelters were made available and no new space was opened for Nickelsville-style tent cities. Instead, Nickelsville residents get more case managers.
That’s partly because he doesn’t consider himself homeless—he stays with boyfriends, he says, and couch-surfs—and partly because he’s smoking weed with his friend, Robert Shuman, a 45-year-old self-described “homeless tweaker” who freely admits he’s homeless because he got hooked on drugs and lost everything.
You make your choices, you suffer the consequences of those choices. Welcome to life, morons.
Homeless? Oscar McKinny’s shirt looks more pressed than the working Oscar Madison’s ever did.
37.770349° -122.412774°
Above is geo-coordinates if you want to see this location on Google Earth.
Sure beats going there in person! I was last in SF in 2005, and even at that time, I thought it was a filthy, disgusting mess (and I live near, and frequently go into, NYC, which is pristine by comparison).
And with the Kali laws, I’m sure it would be illegal to move your car at that point. If you do, the bum camped next to it is now the proud owner.
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