View from abroad focuses S.F. crisis
Most tourists visiting London are awed by Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge. But when you’re a longtime San Franciscan traipsing around the British capital, some of the city’s most striking sights are those that aren’t there at all.
There’s some litter, sure, but no heaps of trash. I didn’t see any needles or piles of poop. There were a few homeless people holding cardboard signs asking for money or shaking cans in hopes of change, but I didn’t see any large tent encampments, injection drug use in public or people clearly out of their minds due to drugs or untreated mental illness.
Every subway escalator actually worked — and none were clogged with needles or human feces as they sometimes are here. (I was also shocked to hear a voice over a loudspeaker at Waterloo station apologize profusely when a train was running four minutes late. Imagine that!)
Sure, it’s easy to notice the good stuff when you’re on vacation and the whole point is to have fun. But in talking to friends and colleagues who’ve done their own recent traveling, it’s clear that many cities around the world and the U.S. maintain a better quality of life for resi
dents of all income levels, as well as create a better experience for visitors.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he saw far fewer homeless people during a spring vacation to Athens and Rome than he does in San Francisco — and that there seemed to be less tension between those living on the streets and those who are housed. He said he noticed one homeless man in Rome leave his belongings outside a shop during the day — and they’d always be there when the man returned in the evening. The shopkeeper, Mandelman said, didn’t seem to mind.
Did he see public injection drug use in Athens or Rome?
“No!” Mandelman said adamantly.
Mentally ill or high people wandering into traffic? “No!” he repeated. People still in hospital gowns or bracelets released back to the streets from the city’s psychiatric emergency rooms?
“No!” he said again. “Absolutely not!”
Of course, European countries tend to provide much more robust health care and have a safety net that catches people before they’re so far gone that they’re walking into busy streets in hospital gowns.
But Mandelman said San Francisco’s liveandletlive mentality also plays a damaging role.
“They have a lower tolerance for this level of disorder,” Mandelman said of other cities. “Collectively, we seem to be resistant to intervening in folks’ lives.”
He said the monthslong squabble over approving minor changes to the city’s conservatorship program — which was eventually passed — was a good example of San Francisco dithering rather than taking quick, decisive action to address our street misery.
And without quick action, the problems just get worse.
“You’re in your rowboat and you have a bucket to get the water out, but the waves just keep coming in,” he said of City Hall’s attempts to ease homelessness and misery on the streets. “Sometimes the bucket feels like a thimble.”
Supervisor Catherine Stefani is traveling around Italy with her daughter now. She said every city she’s been to on the trip has been cleaner than San Francisco, and she’s seen no evidence of drug use on the streets or severely mentally ill people abandoned on the sidewalks.
“Back in the United States, on a national scale, we don’t prioritize mental health, and we don’t do enough to combat the opioid epidemic,” she said. “Our local governments are on their own to deal with the crisis, and what we end up with is the status quo of allowing people to live and die on our streets.”
It’s true that no city can solve homelessness on its own, considering the federal government has slashed funds for public housing and other remedies. But plenty of American cities lack the “Night of the Living Dead” scenes playing out here every day.
I visited New York City in April and saw just a few homeless people on the streets and far less trash and drug paraphernalia. A friend who is taking her son on a tour of Major League Baseball stadiums this summer — best mom ever — said she hasn’t seen any city with San Francisco’s level of homelessness or trash.
Sam Dodge, the homeless coordinator for the city’s Public Works Department, is visiting family in Seattle now and said he sees progress there. He previously worked on homeless issues in New York City and said he sees headway made there, too.
“When you live in the middle of it for a while, you find a way to normalize it and to be able to move through your day,” he said. “But even with just a little distance from it, you realize what a tragedy it is and the urgency of the need.”
In Britain, which has a population of 66 million people, a nonprofit called Shelter last year estimated the homeless population there had grown to 320,000, a 4% uptick from the previous year. But the most shocking statistic to me was that just 5,096 of them sleep on the street. The vast majority are in shelters or other temporary accommodations.
Yes, in all of Britain, just 5,096 people sleep outside. That’s fewer than sleep outside in San Francisco alone. Let that sink in for a minute.
San Francisco’s final homeless count numbers — quietly released Friday, the day bureaucrats deliver news they hope will go unnoticed — confirmed earlier estimates that there are 8,011 homeless people here, a 17 percent uptick from two years ago. That’s in a city with a population of 884,000. A remarkable 5,180 of them are unsheltered — sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, tents or vehicles.
Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said Monday the numbers are “really discouraging.”
The numbers are disastrous all over California, though many cities in other parts of the country fared better.
“It seems to be very concentrated in California, and that’s very much related to our housing crisis in the state,” Kositsky said.
He dismissed any comparison to European countries as “completely different” since they have extensive systems of affordable housing, which our country lacks.
“Every time somebody goes somewhere and decides to opine on that, I don’t know how helpful that really is,” he said. “I’m concerned about what’s going on right here, right now.”
But San Franciscans have become so inured to street misery that traveling elsewhere can remind us it’s not acceptable — or shouldn’t be, anyway.
Supervisor Matt Haney said he was surprised to see few homeless people on a recent trip to Puerto Rico, obviously a much poorer place than San Francisco.
“San Francisco is shocking for the level of normalcy of homelessness in the sense that people just take it for granted as a part of life here,” Haney said. “For people who come to visit here, they’re still shocked by it. They’re still unnerved by it, and I think we should still be shocked and unnerved by it. Unfortunately, we have the opposite response which is that we’re shocked by the lack of it in other places.”
Have you recently traveled to another city — American or international — and been surprised by what you saw? How did it compare to San Francisco, for better or for worse? Email me your thoughts. Answers may appear in a future column.