Quote:
Originally Posted by bluntcard
So, I left San Francisco 13 years ago and check this page periodically to see what changes are happening. The image with the cement blocks and the tents and shanty town looking structures and what looks to be thirty homeless people, is this San Francisco now?
When I left there were issues, always have been but not like this. Why is this OK? It can't be beneficiary, safe or healthy to allow human beings to live like this? Are there restrooms provided for all of these people?
Is this because of Covid? The mayor is OK with this? I don't want SF to be like NYC but this is like walking into a hoarders house. It's not safe for anyone to live like this.
And what about the residents of those buildings they are blocking? They have to walk through this mass of people? How safe can that be? And if you're a business you just have to accept this in front of your restaurant, etc?
I'm a progressive Democrat, I'd vote out every single person in charge of governing this city. No excuses for this.
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Probably not the place to have a lengthy discussion of the subject but yes, it's partly related to covid in that the city took the CDC's advice and closed its large-scale shelters where many people were given a cot in one room. The CDC opined it was less risky to let them camp out in tent cities than in one large room (one Supervisor even had his office pass out tents). The city has attempted to replace the shelters with rooms in hotels that were emptied out of their normal tourists (some hoteliers were willing to rent rooms for this purpose rather than leave their rooms empty) but the numbers are simply overwhelming.
From my observation, somehow the homeless have also been concentrated in a few blocks of the Tenderloin along Golden Gate, Turk and Eddy Sts and this project happens to sit in one such area. It happens that St. Anthony's Dining Room, a major "feed the homeless" site, is just up the street and there are numerous other homeless-related services in the area so I'm not sure if they are simply attracted to these blocks or what but it has to impact the development projects as I'm suggesting.
Again regarding covid, you have to give San Francisco credit in somehow NOT letting the combination of its large homeless population and the pandemic turn into disaster. I noted elsewhere in the last couple of days that San Francisco General Hospital, the hospital where the homeless are admitted when they need to be, had ZERO covid patients . . . NONE. It hasn't gotten much publicity but there must have been massive outreach to get them vaccinated or something. About 65% of adults living in the Tenderloin, whether or not they have a "fixed address", have now been vaccinated (
https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/COV...aps/uue2-6gdn/ ).