Get It Together San Francisco
In Politics and Football San Francisco Comes Close But Loses in Overtime
It was a cloudy, cold Sunday in San Francisco. The city felt quiet for even a Sunday, with the storefronts boarded up, and even the park near my apartment closed. The city was expecting a Super Bowl win and a riot.
This has typified San Francisco post-Covid. We expected the workers to come back, we expected the shoppers to come back, we expected the tourists to come back, but they did not. We expect declaring a state of emergency would change the drug problem on our streets. But no.
In my year and a half living in San Francisco, there have been many expectations that have not materialized as the city has continued its slide into the Doom Loop. Are we there yet?
Some people believe things have gotten better, and I admit the streets do have a few more people who look like workers on their way to or from work. The BART train has more commuters, but this only serves to dilute the other residents who do not look like they are heading to work. The bright spot has been the opening of Miller & Lux Provisions near Union Square by Tyler Florence, proving not everyone is willing to give up on San Francisco. They serve soft-swirled ice cream in a croissant!
Living in San Francisco at this point in time and especially in winter, can be dreary, so I have spent most of the winter elsewhere, and what I have noticed is that I now see unhoused people in other places like suburban Lafayette and Orinda. Not in the same number as we see here in the Financial District in San Francisco, but I did see two kids smoking crack in the Lafayette BART Station as the attendant sat in his glass office looking at his phone. This was in the afternoon while students were in the station riding BART home from school. It’s chilling how normal it is to see this in public now and how everyone looks the other way.
Another day, a man was screaming in the Orinda BART Station while throwing garbage from a garbage can all over the street as the attendant looked out his glass window and the commuters hustled by on their way home from work. I have never seen this sort of thing in Orinda before, and I am at a loss as to what to do in these situations. Do I help? Do I walk by? What I do know is that we have a humanitarian disaster on our hands. That is the one thing that both sides of the aisle can agree on.
On Sunday, when the 49'er lost in overtime, I had the same feeling I have walking around San Francisco, like everyone is trying, but they can’t quite get it together.
Elections are coming up on March 5th in San Francisco. Here is the Voter Guide from SF Action, a moderate group trying to bring the city back. Below is an excerpt from their website…
It’s often said that you can judge the health of a society by how they treat their most vulnerable. If that’s the standard, San Francisco has been failing miserably — not just post-pandemic — but for the past half century.
Thousands of unhoused people with untreated mental health and substance use disorders live on the streets in San Francisco. The intersection between drugs and homelessness in San Francisco is well-documented, as unhoused people self-medicate to fix untreated mental health disorders. But deadly new synthetic drugs like fentanyl are causing overdose deaths to skyrocket, and the city is unprepared to deal with the opioid epidemic.
The city spends millions of dollars each year trying to fix homelessness in San Francisco — the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is set to receive $646 million in 2024. But these funds haven’t helped. Homelessness in San Francisco increased 43 percent from 2005 to the last point-in-time homelessness count in 2022.
Elected officials have tried to solve the homelessness problem in San Francisco for decades, trying wildly different methods over the years. So why are there so many homeless people in San Francisco?
To find the inciting incident for the crisis we see today on San Francisco’s streets, we need to go back to the 1960s. Before the 1960s, people with mental health disorders in California were often treated in large mental health hospitals run by the state. These hospitals were poorly run overall, and often the sites of human rights abuses.
As the public became aware of these abuses, there was a campaign to close these hospitals. Advances in antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine gave advocates hope that people with mental health disorders could be treated back in their communities. State officials agreed, and began to shutter California’s mental hospitals in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Unfortunately, funding and resources for community mental health care never arrived at the scale necessary to meet the need, and many people with mental health disorders ended up on the streets or in jail. Communities like San Francisco were left to try to devise solutions to care for the increasing number of unhoused people with mental health disorders on their own. — SF Together
I think it’s clear we have to get it together somehow.
Love and blessings to all.