Out of house and home
Zachary Faria
What do you get when you cross liberal “empathy” governance with the political reality that people don’t like health hazards popping up in their neighborhoods?
You get San Francisco.
The city of San Francisco has finally bent to pressure to clear out homeless encampments … sort of. The city has been trying to clear out these camps, which have become health and safety hazards in some communities, leading to some residents carrying baseball bats and Tasers to protect themselves from the unstable homeless people who live in them. Feces and urine on sidewalks, as well as appliance fires, have also turned the encampments into health hazards for residents.
One teeny-tiny problem with this encampment clearing effort: It is against San Francisco law to clear homeless encampments without offering a shelter bed. San Francisco has spent $2.8 billion on its “Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing” since 2016, including $1.7 billion in the last two years, and yet the city does not have enough shelter beds to comply with its own law for removing homeless encampments.
You would think that this would have been solved by now, in part because a mayor by the name of Gavin Newsom once promised to end homelessness in San Francisco in 10 years. That promise was made 14 years ago. But San Francisco has let its empathy genie out of the bottle, allowing camps to blossom while enshrining protections for them. Now that city leaders actually want to make the city less of a dump, they find that they blocked themselves from doing it years ago.
Maybe the city should have used those billions of dollars to build some beds. Then again, if it costs $1 million for the city to build one toilet, maybe $2.8 billion was never going to be enough.