Posted on 08/17/2015 7:23:07 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
San Francisco — The homeless are a challenge for almost every American city, but nothing like they are for San Francisco. The city’s mild, year-round climate, famously liberal “live and let live” attitude, and a dense network of social services have made the problem worse than ever there. The city has some 3,200 people living on its streets, and the number is growing.
Two recent news items brought the issue into sharp focus. First, a light pole collapsed downtown, crushing a car and barely missing the driver. The cause? It had been corroded by urine aimed at it by street people. As someone returning this week to a city that I lived in and still love, I find it shocking to encounter the smell of urine on block after block — or to witness a frightened Hispanic mother flee with her baby from a restroom area at the city’s Aquatic Park because a deranged man is screaming and throwing things there, with no police in sight.
Then, just this week, the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) announced it was backing a lawsuit against a Boise, Idaho, ordinance that forbids camping or sleeping on public property. The DOJ claims that when a city can’t provide adequate shelter for all its homeless, such laws violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. From the DOJ’s filing: “If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.”
San Francisco mayor Ed Lee reacted cautiously to the DOJ’s action, which could call into question city policies that close parks during early-morning hours and that prohibit people from sitting or lying on sidewalks during daylight hours. “Enforcing laws that protect public safety and the health of people we serve are paramount,” said Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman for the mayor. Lee himself told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Debra Saunders this month, “I do think that people are being somewhat more irresponsible.” He also told her the city’s major problem is “not so much the urination” but “historic levels of drug use.” Making many drug crimes misdemeanors rather than felonies means that many people are released from custody before they have worked through their “bad habits.” One police officer interviewed by Saunders was blunt: “If you are a drug addict, you are going to come to San Francisco.”
The city is currently spending $458,000 a day (or $34 a day per homeless person) trying to handle the growing number of street people. It is building 500 new single-room-occupancy residences with full services for street people, but I can’t find anyone who thinks this will keep pace with the demand. “If you build them, they will come,” an old friend of mine says of the homeless, whom he says need tough love more than housing. “The problem isn’t getting better with more homeless housing,” Edwin El Cid, who immigrated from Argentina some 20 years ago, tells me.
But advocates for the homeless insist that spending more money is the answer. A new report by the University of California–Berkeley Law Clinic argues that “quality of life” laws intended to prevent people from occupying streets are offensive because they work against “poor people, people of color, and homeless people.”
The non-PC truth is that far too many of the homeless are mired in drug and mental-health issues. In the 1990s, I returned to San Francisco to report on a program in which pedestrians and tourists were encouraged to hand out coupons instead of money to the homeless. The coupons were redeemable for many things: a free meal, clothing, haircuts, and laundromat services. Over the course of several days, I tried to distribute such coupons and met rejection about 80 percent of the time. Cash was what homeless people wanted — and for you know what.
‘My biggest adversaries are government homeless shelters that don’t ask people to do anything for themselves.’
Still, there are approaches worth trying for those who struggle with mental illness or substance-abuse problems. The late Bob Cote, a homeless man who picked himself up off the streets and founded the Step 13 homeless shelter in Denver, used to give me tours of his facility and noted his very high success rate with those who stuck with his “no drugs, no booze, find a job” program. “My biggest adversaries are government homeless shelters that don’t ask people to do anything for themselves, and Social Security Disability programs that allow people to continue the same mistakes they’ve been making,” he told me. Cote was constantly battling the bureaucrats in Denver who oversaw homeless issues, which is one reason he would accept no government money, or the strings that came with it.
Short of tough love, other programs can improve the condition of the hard-core homeless. Mayor Lee opened an innovative Navigator Center in March that takes the time needed to steer the chronic homeless into the right programs and rehabilitation services. Its homeless housing doesn’t have strict curfews and allows residents to bring partners, possessions, and pets with them. This allows the city to reach some people who are so wedded to the people and things that are familiar to them that they won’t leave the streets.
The Navigator Center has drawn praise from Stephen Goldsmith, a former two-term Republican mayor of Indianapolis who is now a Harvard fellow. “Leaving a homeless person on the street costs the city $60,000 per person per year for such services as emergency care, police visits, and shelter stays, while providing government-supported housing costs only $20,000 a year,” Goldsmith recently observed.
Finding the right balance between compassion and personal responsibility in homeless policy is incredibly difficult. Simply spending money on more apartments for the homeless only attracts more homeless and breeds corruption. Demanding that people get off drugs and alcohol and on to any prescribed medication they have invites howls of outrage and civil-rights lawsuits. Finding a balance should concern all of us not only for reasons of compassion but also because the outrageous condition of San Francisco’s streets is a warning about what could happen to other cities should the Obama Justice Department define most of the existing policies cities now follow as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for National Review Online.
Of course it isn’t.
But 0bama would probable like to put them in group homes in uppity white neighborhoods.
Homelessness in the US—Courtesy of JFK’s Community Mental Health Act (1963).
The mentally ill are living under bridges and eating out of dumpsters but, by gad, they have their dignity.
Also, friends don’t let friends vote democrat.
This is happening more and more in NYC. It started as soon as Guiliani left office and has really increased under DeBlasio.
Liberal policies are biting us in the butt.
When did anyone start to suggest that there is some constitutional right to sleep and P**S and S$$^ anyplace in public?
We could discuss what we are doing to get homeless off the street, but, can’t we all agree that it’s not good for them or good for society for the homeless to be in the streets??
I recall a recent article, in which someone wrote that San Francisco reeks of urine in many parts of the city.
Do liberals really think it’s compassionate to allow people to live in the streets????
It is building 500 new single-room-occupancy residences with full services for street people
______________________________________________
they don’t need single rooms...put them in dormitories..
Ponder this. Obama is only mentioned in the article twice. One might say innocuously matter-of-fact. So how does this “compassion” thing fit into the political horizon?
Maybe, just maybe, bleeding heart liberals are beginning to think the Hildebeast will fall and someone not Democrat will win in 2016. Egad! Possibly even Trump?
If so, even if Trump doesn’t win, they need to prep the PC bleeding heart PC battlefield with words familiar to RINOS (i.e., “compassion” or “have a heart” and the like) in case the Dark Side (GOP establishment) wins out.
In short, they’re telegraphing that they’re gonna get back on that Crazy assed mental / Homeless bandwagon the minute their guy doesn’t win.
But San Francisco is a Liberal city. Liberals have the answers to homelessness!
States should be responsible for rounding them up and placing them in “state run” (not private), clean safe rehab institutions. Problem solved.
Homeless shelters essentially ARE dormitories, which is why a lot of homeless won’t go there, due to privacy and safety issues. It’s safer and more private (and easier to shoot dope, or stab whoever tries to steal one’s dope) on the street, doncha know.
Sounds logical enough. After all, they don't live alone under bridges or in park encampments.
But I'm sure our libtard masters will come up with dozens of reasons as to why they need single rooms starting with they might share needles or harm or assault each other.
I thought John Kasich wrote this article.
Actually in Lawrence Kansas there was a push to build a homeless shelter in just such an area but I think that the lack of public transportation in that area made it fail. The homeless prefer to live downtown close to the Salvation Army and good places to pan-handle. Because of lax laws on buskering, a homeless person only needs to stand on a corner and sing with a tip jar to beat any loitering charge.
But San Francisco is a Liberal city. Liberals have the answers to homelessness!
I never understand why so many cities run by liberals/Democrats for generations are in such sad shape.
Reason being, if liberal policies and Democrat party positions were the answers to solving various social problems, these problems should have been solved where Democrats are in charge. There is no meaningful Republican or other political opposition in many cities run by Democrats. So they have been able to implement their agendas unfettered.
Considering this, why are so many Democrat run cities such basket cases, if liberal policies were the answers to our problems?????
And why have I never heard anyone in the media ever ask such questions??? Why have I never heard any Democrat politician address and defend the results of their policies???
They wouldn’t get a single room in a jail..
Nothing like paying obscene prices due to rent control just to get that genuine urine smell waft through your windows.
Sanctuary cities aren't very compassionate, are they?
The hobos peed on a metal lamppost and rusted it and it fell over on a car?
Put those guys to work!
“It will cost us $500,000 to drop this bridge or we can have Willy The Wino come over and pee on it for a joint.”
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