Unfeeling City

By Anonymous / Spring 2020

My family has always been fortunate enough to have a roof over our heads, when times were tough or when we first came to this country we had the great fortune to be able to stay with friends and family we got back on our feet. Some of my earliest memories were being left with great aunts and uncles during the weekdays while my parents would work long hours struggling to find an apartment/house that we could permanently live in. We never had to sleep on the street or anything like that, but for the first few years of my life in America, we had no permanent residence. The difference between my parents and the streets was just a group of friends and family willing to put them up for a bit. Millions of Americans have similar stories to us and are not nearly as fortunate as we are, and in San Francisco itself, the number of homeless people is over 8000. These are people down on their luck, unwanted by the citizens, the companies, and the government but are needed for day to day life. They are degraded and given no help because they “deserve” it, and in a pandemic, they are some of the most vulnerable.   

Hearing my tale, one might wonder how hardworking people who have jobs aren’t able to afford an apartment, let alone be both a full-time worker and homeless. I would respond with the fact that homelessness in San Francisco, is rampant and is not like other homeless epidemics across the country. There have been studies done on the homeless population of the Bay Area in comparison with the rest of the US, and the results show vastly different pictures. Homelessness is broken up into different classifications, reoccurring and first time, and each of those classifications is broken up even further to consider addiction, mental health, unsupervised youth, families, etc. The picture of homeless across the rest of the country is similar, reflecting tales of abandoned veterans, runaway children/unsupervised youth, and the mentally ill and the addicted being the ones to suffer the most from reoccurring homelessness. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the veterans and the unsupervised youth tend to fall more towards first time homelessness and tend to get off the street quite quickly. Most of the reoccurring homelessness in San Francisco is based on individuals who simply do not make enough money to support themselves (Turner). Often, they are essential workers, stocking the shelves of a grocery store by day and sleeping on the streets at night, possibly working multiple jobs. People who have lived and worked in San Francisco/the Bay Area for several years, who are now out on the streets.

A person may wonder, how are essential workers out on the street? They work a stable and in demand job, why are they homeless when they have been in the city for years beforehand without suffering from homelessness, and how they continue to work while homeless. The problem comes with the cost of living in San Francisco, notoriously the most expensive city in the world to live in per square foot. Rent for a studio apartment can easily go from $2000 to $6000 a month, small homes average between a million or two to buy, but the median income in the city is approximately $60,000. Looking at asking prices and the amount of income a person makes a year, it is no wonder that you will not be able to buy a home. My brother works as a loan officer in a bank, earns about $70,000 a year, and yet even then he has struggled for nearly three years in finding an apartment of his own in the city. The only options are picking up several roommates and getting one of the outrageously priced apartments/homes that will charge five digits a month for rent, move out of the city and commute every day, a prospect that more and more workers are now considering, or to live at home with my parents. I think it is obvious that he had no choice but to continue living at home with my parents. 

Now that answers the question of why people cannot get new homes, but the even bigger mystery is if they had already been living in the city, how did they lose their homes? Looking at a personal example, my parents and my uncle lived in separate parts of the city, but around 2008, my grandfather died. I do not remember much from around that time due to how young I was, but I do remember that my uncle moved in with my family. It was only years later that I realized that the death of my grandfather hit my uncle hard, and that he fell into a dark depression. He had stopped going into work, could not make rent for the month, and was evicted very quickly. He moved in with my parents, but they argued constantly about his newfound drinking problem. Eventually, my dad asked my uncle to leave, whereupon my uncle seemed to disappear. I found out he had been homeless for a couple of weeks and had accidentally fallen off a pier and drowned.

This tale tells how someone who works and lives in the city quickly turning to the streets. If your life falters for even a moment, whether that is a death of a loved one or a medical emergency then you will not be able to recover. If life gets in the way and you fail to make rent, you can basically kiss your home goodbye. Once you hit the streets once, getting off is incredibly difficult. You’ll bounce around the streets, living in your car, or from shelter to shelter trying to get some semblance of normality, but once you find yourself homeless, it’s hard to go back to your job and act like everything is normal after you’ve spent the night on the street. This vicious experience is likely to take a toll on your mental health and often leads to drug abuse which exacerbates the problem. The homeless become desperate, and turn to crime such as prostitution or robbery, to live day by day. You may argue that people can turn to all sorts of systems to help them, homeless shelters, government assisted housing, even welfare for those who cannot work for whatever reason. While I will concede that the systems exist, I will argue that they are massively lacking when it comes to an epidemic of this size. They are especially egregious when you consider a pandemic the scope of which has never been seen before in America, which will be looked at later.

Speaking of the cycle of homelessness and the mentally ill/addicted, those suffering from addiction or mental illness alternate from the hospital, to a jail cell, to the streets. They will end up in emergency services whether it be due to violence, overdosing, the environment, etc. They will be given just enough care to keep them alive and then they are kicked out again, whereupon they go back to streets. The cycle will repeat itself for some time, they have few, if any resources to get to help them with their problems, but even that is underfunded or unknown about. After all, how would a homeless person even know about the services available when it comes to something like help with addiction? San Francisco has recently implemented something where as soon as a homeless person enters the medical services, they are given a guide for what they can do and the amount of services they can partake in. The unfortunate part of this is that it is completely voluntary. If you are mentally ill or addicted, how often do you think you have a problem? As put by the San Francisco Chronicle, “But since the majority of the city's programs are voluntary, there is little the coordinator can do if someone doesn't accept the care. Only a handful of the city's mentally ill and drug-addicted qualify for involuntary care under a new law passed by the Board of Supervisors this year” (Fracassa and Thadani). Most of them will ignore it and be back on the street in a matter of days.

The number of homeless populations in San Francisco is more than 8000 people, of which most of them are considered unsheltered. The waitlist for a bed in a homeless shelter or government assisted housing is basically first come first serve, and unless you have a very severe case that would give you priority like pregnancy, then you will be on that list for weeks, maybe even months. San Francisco is prime real estate, with Silicon Valley all fighting to have an office space in the city and the workers that they bring with them also need apartments and homes in the city. As such, the debate between whether to use a piece of land to build a homeless shelter or whether to build an apartment building is not a debate at all. Factor in the fact that the City Government and the normal everyday citizen doesn’t want the homeless in their neighborhoods, it’s not surprising that the shelter given to them is nonexistent. There are about a handful of homeless shelters in San Francisco, along with maybe another dozen help centers offered by churches, kind-hearted individuals, etc. with each main shelter containing probably a couple hundred, and the help centers housing less than a hundred per. If you were to maximize those numbers, you would fall under 2000 people, far too small for San Francisco.

            Now comes the idea of welfare. San Francisco has a neoliberal idea that there should be self-reliance, and the lectures on neoliberalism are showcased here where the social safety net is dismantled. The people want accountability and blame the homeless for their own status, the normal person does not want to work for hours but have someone be paid welfare. So, in 2002, Gavin Newsom on the board of supervisors at the time, introduced a new proposition, the Cash for Care Act. As described by the city, “Funds formerly used for cash aid are instead used to expand permanent housing and services for this population” (Tipton, Alderete, and Flaherty). This proposition basically boiled down to reducing the amount of welfare given to the homeless, and instead of individual checks they would take that money and funnel it into other services that would help get them out of homelessness and poverty. Mental health, drug rehabilitation, etc. However, the essential worker, the majority of the homeless in San Francisco who needed that assistance, suddenly found no safety net. They got no money; they could not pay rent and stay out of the streets while they continued to work. They just found the streets. The amount of homelessness in San Francisco jumped after the proposition, and even with the new resources the number of people who described themselves as “unsheltered” continues to climb.

When looking at the rising homeless numbers and comparing them with the opulent wealth of the major Silicon Valley companies, there is a major disparity in San Francisco between the classes. San Francisco loves the tech industry; Silicon Valley and major businesses have their headquarters in San Francisco, garnering the area they all reside the Financial District. Ironically, the homeless and the major businesses live hand in hand with one another. Most of these businesses are downtown, where the concentration of homeless people stays in the city. If you walk downtown San Francisco, you’ll encounter streets with major homeless camps set up, tents and boxes set up along the street from corner to corner, but if you go two blocks over you would be able to see the pristine building that consist of the office buildings for Twitter. You could even see the homeless people in the if you looked the window, that is how close they live together. As you work in the offices, right outside they slowly die.

As such, big business and the government of San Francisco want to keep the two separated as much as possible. The government of San Francisco wants these big businesses in the city. These engineers, salespeople, businessmen, etc. are welcome to San Francisco, promising cutbacks when it comes to the amount of corporate tax a company must pay to the city being the most used promise. This of course leads to the dismantling of the social safety net in San Francisco when it comes to the homeless, without the money to build homeless shelters, build drug rehabilitation centers, or mental health facilities, the homeless population grows. The government of San Francisco will even go out of their way to attract businesses by suppressing the amount of homeless camps and other unsightly things that would drive businesses and their employees away. As repeated through history, crush the undesirable to appeal to the desired, this strategy has been seen with the Indigenous People, the African Americans, the Chinese, etc. The streets of downtown are frequently hosed down in an attempt to wash away the excrement of the homeless, and Mayor London Breed was recently exposed for ordering the secret raid/sweep of homeless encampments in downtown as shown in a conversation uncovered by a local San Francisco organization:

“Police are there but we need to clear it out and clean it up. 800 block of market in front of Walgreens” Breed wrote to Scott (Police Chief), Elsbernd (Head of Staff) and others the next day.

“800 block of Market in front of Walgreens cleared,” Scott replied hours later. 

“Thank you. Let’s keep that block safe and clean. It is our bread and butter,” Breed replied. (Mark)

All these tax cuts has benefitted nobody however, the regular everyday person hasn’t seen anything other than the rise of the homeless, the homeless don’t see anything except their numbers grow, and the businesses who benefited are now considering leaving SF due to the rampant homeless situation and the cost of living of their employees (Wong). The fight that tech workers and companies so long fought now complain about the outcome of that fight.

Another major aspect that affects the homeless is the criminalization of being homeless. As hinted by the messages from Mayor Breed, the homeless need to go. It seems to be a long-standing policy that the homeless are not wanted in the city, when in 2010 the city of San Francisco implemented the Sit-Lie Ordinance. The gist of it is that homeless people cannot loiter around a sidewalk between the hours or 11 PM to 7 AM, and if they are caught doing so, they would be fined or arrested. I cannot help but notice that 11 PM to 7 AM is usually when most people sleep, and if you are working an essential job and don’t have shelter, you won’t be able to sleep without being penalized (Egelko and Fagan). Punished for living out on the streets, as if it were some merry activity they wanted to do. The trend continued across the rest of the US, and the Supreme Court even had to get involved and struck these kind of ordinances, but the one in San Francisco has continued unabated on a technicality that restricting homelessness during certain hours wasn’t considered, only blanket bans. The ordinance continues to this day.

The common citizen of San Francisco sees the homeless issue and ignores it. It has just become a part of life, and only within the last year or so, when the size of them has been ballooning to impact the life of the citizens, do they care. When the homeless was merely a person each city block, quietly begging for money, they could be ignored. They have earned their place, and while it was unfortunate that they lived on the streets, there are ways to get help. Any money you would give them would probably just go to booze or drugs would be the prevailing thought in San Francisco. Only when the homeless start to commit crime or defecate in the streets do people care. Only when it started to inconvenience the normal citizen do they care. Two stories exemplify this, a major homeless recourse and shelter called a navigation shelter was being built, and the people living in that neighborhood started a protest saying they don’t want the homeless shelter, there would be an increase in crime, even though there hadn’t been (Vazquez). Another is the story of the SF restaurant that sued the city about the homeless situation only when the homeless started staying outside his restaurant and driving customers away (Batey). It has become a numb issue that only ever flares its ugly head when it’s inconveniencing, people don’t see other people, just annoyances.

Now comes the recent issue of coronavirus and the homeless. It is noted around the country that coronavirus is going to hit the homeless populations of every city very hard, since they have very little shelter and if they do have shelter in the form of homeless shelters, they don’t have the luxury of social distancing. They all pushed together, back to back. In the Bay Area, the situation is even more dire. It should be noted that homelessness in San Francisco has gone up since the start of the pandemic, with 71% more tents set up and with an increase of 200% more requests for shelter from the homeless (Browning). Following Governor Newsom’s decree that he would set aside some state money in order to acquire rooms for the homeless in hotels and motels, the SF board of supervisors passed a decree that the city would be searching for 8000 rooms itself. However, Mayor Breed is not bound to the decisions made by the board of supervisors, “Mayor London Breed has shown little interest in proactively placing vulnerable and/or homeless people in hotel rooms before they get sick and spread the disease. That was never her plan, regardless of what all 11 supervisors wanted” (Eskenazi). The city has acquired about 1400 rooms, and of those rooms about half of them have been use. Half sit empty, the strategy seems to be that the remaining rooms are meant for people who have the virus and need to be isolated. In fact, in the early days of the shutdown Breed instructed homeless shelters to kick out residents to adhere to social distancing guidelines, while offering nowhere for them to go (Ho).

As noted, a lot of our homeless are essential workers. Many of them work in warehouses or in grocery stores, so they can get coronavirus there and bring it back to the homeless where they can more easily spread it, and as discussed in class, personal protective equipment isn’t given to them, there just isn’t enough. In fact, in mid-April, from one shelter alone, 70 homeless people there were infected (Carrega). Most of them did not even show symptoms and would be able to spread it freely amongst each other and anyone they met at any of their essential jobs. In response to this, the board of supervisors announced an intention to test every homeless person in the city, but the city government killed the plan by late April and instead moved to testing a couple underserved neighborhoods and a couple of the bigger neighborhoods in San Francisco. The city showed they could have offered more help and given more care for them, but they just don’t want to. The only reason they did so now was because of the mass paranoia striking fear in everyone, but even as soon as the paranoia died down and it looked like the numbers were stabilizing, all the care suddenly disappeared. To this day, there is no plan to test the homeless unless they show symptoms.

The biggest thing to note that some homeless people have been moved to hotel rooms, and for them this is the best possible moves. This offers them stability and safety in these times. However, they worry about the sword of Damocles, the possibility that as soon as they catch coronavirus and recover from it, they will be put back out onto the streets. Mayor Breed has announced the desire to sanitize the neighborhoods that the homeless tend to live on them most, so that when they go back to living on the streets, they will be safe from the virus. She has also announced designated spaces for the homeless set up tents, but even then, we go back to the earlier problems of the homeless being homeless for all of perpetuity. While this seems good and is good that it provides the homeless more security and the ability to feel safer, they are still living on the streets when there are empty hotel rooms that the city has reserved. Offering the homeless an opportunity to live a normal, safe life and then removing that when they either get sick and recover or when someone else needs it, is cruel and unusual.

Having seen how the homeless is treated, we can see that they are unwanted by nearly everyone. The disconnect between people that they are different from one another, when the only difference between each other would be the amount of luck they have, tells a tale of an unfeeling city. However, with Mayor Breed’s recent actions and people seeing the affect of corona on the homeless, I hope to see that people will care more. The city has shown that it can care for the homeless, it can treat them with some dignity, they just do not. But with people being especially attuned to injustices in the world now, there should be more attention about aid being needed and able to be given, it just wasn’t because they aren’t wanted.

Works Cited

Batey, Eve. "Co-Owner Of Civic Center Restaurant Sues SF Over Tenderloin Crime, Homelessness." 5 May 2020. SF Eater. 25 May 2020.

Browning, Corey. "SF’s first sanctioned camping site for the homeless gives residents a safe place to sleep." 16 May 2020. San Francisco Examiner. 25 May 2020.

Carrega, Christina. "70 people contract coronavirus in San Francisco's largest homeless shelter." 11 April 2020. ABC News. 23 May 2020.

Egelko, Bob and Kevin Fagan. "Homelessness: It’s not a crime to sleep on the street — absent other options, court says." 4 September 2018. SF Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Homelessness-It-s-not-a-crime-to-sleep-on-the-13204373.php. 29 May 2020.

Eskenazi, Joe. "Mayor London Breed blew off unanimous legislation to put homeless in hotels. Yes, she can do that." 28 April 2020. Mission Local. 25 May 2020.

Fracassa, Dominic and Trisha Thadani . "SF counts 4,000 homeless, addicted and mentally ill, but timeline for help still unclear." 4 September 2019. SF Chronicle. 20 May 2020.

Ho, Vivian. "San Francisco’s homeless deaths have tripled. Advocates blame city neglect during pandemic." 29 May 2020. The Guardian. 3 June 2020.

Mark, Julian. "Trove of text messages reveals Mayor London Breed ordered homeless sweeps directly — despite frequent denials." 26 May 2020. Mission Local. 29 May 2020.

Tipton, Mark, Paige Alderete and Stephen Flaherty. "Care Not Cash Is Achieving Its Goals." 30 April 2008. San Francisco Controller. 23 May 2020.

Turner, Molly. "Homelessness in the Bay Area." 23 October 2017. The Urbanist. 24 May 2020.

Vazquez, Joe. "Increased Crime By Mentally Ill Homeless Worries San Francisco North Beach Residents." 1 October 2018. CBS SF. 23 May 2020.

Wong, Julia Carrie. "'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed." 1 July 2019. The Guardian. 5 June 2020.