Posted on 07/02/2015 6:21:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
Downtown San Francisco feels like a large public toilet without enough janitors. More than once this year, I've seen men drop their pants in public places -- including at Fifth and Market -- to leave a smelly mess on the sidewalk. You can walk for blocks and never escape the stench of stale urine. At lunchtime, I see street people passed out on high-traffic sidewalks, and I am afraid to walk around them.
The homeless have been a problem in San Francisco for as far back as anyone remembers, but to me it seems this year is the worst. There's a sense among people who work downtown that City Hall doesn't care about cleaning up San Francisco's Summer of Muck.
If this year is worse, two culprits are the drought and the city's booming economy. The drought means "there's no rain washing down the streets," San Francisco Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon told me. The city's housing and office building boom has filled in alleyways and once-neglected pockets where the homeless used to be able to hide.
Jim Lazarus of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce told me businesses have more complaints about the homeless. "We are a live-and-let-live town genetically," quoth Lazarus, "but we're also letting people live on the streets who shouldn't be living on the streets."
What can be done? Increase the number of uniformed officers on the street. The chamber supports Mayor Ed Lee's 18-month plan to add 300 police officers and bring SFPD to its authorized maximum of 1,971, as well as Supervisor Scott Wiener's proposal to hire an additional 200 cops. "Not that that means you want police out arresting homeless people," said Lazarus, but their presence alone should "encourage more civil behavior."
Lazarus also suggested more public toilets in places like city parking garages. BART is looking at reopening bathrooms in its underground stations -- and erecting canopies to prevent homeless people from using escalators as toilets. It says something about how dysfunctional Bay Area politics are that these common-sense solutions did not happen years ago.
Mayor Lee implemented a Pit Stop program that set up staffed public bathrooms in neighborhoods, starting with the Tenderloin. "It's not going to fix the stink in the city," said Gordon, but requests for sidewalk, alley and street steam cleanings are down near the four Pit Stops. First, I caution, the city has to send the message that it's not OK to eliminate in public.
S.F. homeless czar Bevan Dufty is big on the city's new Navigation Center on 16th Street. Some homeless adults are reluctant to go to a shelter because it means giving up their possessions or splitting with a partner or pet. With services and space to accommodate shopping carts and dogs, the center is designed to transition street people off the street for good.
I love the idea, but I want to see -- or not smell -- something for it. The city's 2014 homeless services budget was $167 million -- to serve 6,355 homeless people. The new homeless census will be out shortly. Dufty told me, "The number is going up, but not significantly up." So you've got about the same number of homeless people passed out, peeing and pooping in the crowded city.
San Francisco is such a beautiful city. Why do we let people poop all over it?
Just another day in the workers paradise.
That's $26,279 per homeless person. Yet they still sh!t in the streets. So, it's not just about the money...
Don't worry. A Republican is never going to be elected there.
SCOOPS!
That’s the correct answer!
THE SCOOPS ARE COMING!!!!!
THE SCOOPS ARE COMING!!!!!
As a bay area resident for the last, oh, 40+ years, I rarely travel into San Francisco unless it’s absolutely necessary.
There’s a significant number of aggressive panhandlers to commute into the city on a daily basis, just to earn a living shaking down visitors. It pays even better if you have a mangy mutt on display.
San Francisco used to be a beautiful place to visit, but it’s become such a challenge to overlook the human vermin that prey on everyone, I no longer go.
And I don’t miss it at all.
, I see street people passed out on high-traffic sidewalks, and I am afraid to walk around them.
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Don’t “walk around them”, step on them.
A common framing of San Francisco's "homeless problem" might be called the magnet theory.
The city has allocated $165 million to homeless services. Over time, it has succeeded in offering 6,355 permanent supportive housing units to the formerly homeless. Nevertheless, the number of homeless people accounted for on the streets has remained stubbornly flat. The city estimates there are about 7,350 homeless people now living in San Francisco.
Since the city has invested so much with such disappointing results, the story goes, there can only be one explanation: Offering robust services has drawn homeless people from elsewhere, like a magnet. By demonstrating kindness, the city has unwittingly converted itself into a Mecca for the homeless, spoiling an otherwise lovely place for all the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who contribute and pay taxes.
and lastly I love the line.........In 2004, city officials and community advocates released a 10-Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness.
http://www.sfbg.com/2014/03/25/san-franciscos-untouchables
They deserve far worse, but because they are wealthy, they manage to avoid what they deserve.
“”What is BART fare?””
That was your post and your question...People misunderstood what you were asking. It sounded as if you were asking what the “fare” was to ride BART. I took it that way and it appears others did also. If you’d said, “What is BART?”, one answer would have been sufficient instead you got a rogues gallery of answers.
$1 for each homeless person, the rest is for those six-figure positions masquerading as "administrative costs".
If the homeless disappeared overnight, mass unemployment would follow.
What can be done? Increase the number of uniformed officers on the street.
***
The real answer, which nobody wants to deal with, is to find a way to have these individuals declared mentally incompetent and confined to institutions. It is the humane way to treat them. Most of them are mentally ill and cannot make proper decisions for themselves.
This was (ahem) 20 years ago. We drive into San Francisco and looked at a few apartments. I saw the roving bands of homeless, the needle drop boxes at Safeway and picked up a local paper that had a Dear Abby style article where the writer was looking for advice as to whether he should approach the librarian at his local library who had a stump leg for a liaison because the writer had a "stump fetish" and I said, "Not for me, I can't live here".
Little did I know 20 years later, that would all appear fairly tame and moderate.
In my beatnick days, going out to SanFran to sit and read in City Lights Bookstore, the winter of 1972, I recall it being the first city I ever witnessed that had no dog laws. They ran and crapped everywhere. I thought at the time: So the Haight-Ashbury mentality percolates down to doggie freedom/anarchy, and the result isn’t pretty.
what are they doing buying each of them a house ???
$25,000 might cover property tax on a house in SF.
I’m convinced many of the mentally I’ll homeless would not use toilets even if such public toilets were widely available
True but those few who do use public toilets make such a mess that the toilets are useless or plugged up, often on purpose.
Many of these street people are out to destroy all that is community. I lived in SF for 30 years and moved out in 2002.
It was sad to see the decline over those 30 years.
In Frisco I don’t think $25G would buy a room.
With the way the homeless act in SF, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up training them....
Woof!
Then again, there are no dog laws in SF (as another poster commented), so we solve one problem, and exacerbate another: piles of dog and wolf poop.
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