[LEMONS] 11.30.2003
Homeless in San Francisco
The Chronicle's new series of articles on homelessness in San Francisco is positively heartbreaking and an all around amazing narrative. It's also neatly timed to coincide with a mayoral runoff election in which homelessness is a major issue.Homelessness is a critical issue in San Francisco. When New Yorkers and Washingtonians recoil in horror at your city's streets, you've got a big-time problem. But I worry that the Chronicle cares less about the homeless than they do getting Newsom elected. This is his signature issue, after all. And the series, timed as close to the election as it is, smacks of Newsom boosting. And passages such as the following might as well scream "vote for Gavin."
Nobody wants to see people in various states of downtroddenness, but nobody knows the solution," Officer Maciel said later. "We're limited to what we can do under the law, and until there are new laws, there's just not that much we can do about people sleeping on the street and panhandling."I think it's wonderful for papers to take positions, but be up front about it. Or keep it in the back in the editorial section. And unfortunately, the homeless "issue" as it's most often portrayed and discussed here seems to be less about this:
Everything from the knee down was a gray, gnarled shank of flesh covered with open and scabbed-over sores. The grubby shoe tongue had fused into the 4- inch-wide raw abscess on Tommy's ankle, just as it had done every night for four months. The heat from the warm evening hit it. A stench like rancid meat wafted up.Or this:
"Make the pain go away! I want my daddy! Make it stop!" she moaned over and over, writhing along the 12th Street sidewalk, slamming hands against cement and walls as she made her way up to Market Street. She picked at abscesses on her arms and face, the blood mixing with dirt to leave brown smears wherever she rolled. She screamed and drooled.And entirely about this:
"Angel, we gotta go, the cops are coming, we gotta go," snapped her boyfriend, black-bearded One-Leg Mike, so dubbed because his left leg succumbed seven years ago to flesh-eating disease. Fighting to keep his crutches under his armpits, he snagged Angel's T-shirt and dragged her down the street, both of them bouncing off walls as they went.
"God. God. God," murmured one woman who runs a shop on Market, watching wide-eyed as the couple staggered. "God. God."
The worst for De Vincenzi came one morning in June. Randy, an old alcoholic, was sitting in his wheelchair by the front Honda entrance chatting with a local hooker over a bottle of vodka when he suddenly slumped over and died. His organs gave out from a lifetime of alcohol abuse, and when the paramedics cut his shirt open his stomach was a raw mass crawling with maggots.I do understand. I do sympathize. I do know how bad it is. I've been threatened and harrassed, I've watched men and women shit, piss, puke, fuck, shoot up and masturbate on our fair city's streets, sidewalks and subways. I have a right to walk down the street unmolested. Nobody enjoys cleaning turds from their doorways. And, fair enough, nobody has the right to shit on another's property, or public property for that matter. You have invested time, energy, and money into your business; you do not want it to drown in a sea of urine and booze.
A handful of Islanders, including Tommy, and local shopkeepers, including De Vincenzi, watched.
"Is this good for business?" De Vincenzi said. "This morning, I was talking to a woman about our cars, and a (homeless woman) backed herself up against the window right behind her head and crapped on the glass. Is that good for business? Nobody in the city seems to know how bad this all is."
Homelessness in San Francisco is horrifying. It threatens to become our city's defining attribute. When visitors from around the country and world think of San Francisco, I worry they will not think of our tolerance, or compassion, or progressive values, our beautiful views, Victorian architecture or mild oceanfront climate. Rather they will think of us a city whose citizens allow thousands of unfortunates to languish in misery on the streets. Yet if it's bad for business, well... It's much much worse for the people on the streets. Our suffering, our discomfort, is nothing compared to theirs. Whatever the reason they landed there; there they are. We have to help them.
The Chronicle is right to run this series, even if the timing is suspicious. The article itself is wonderfully written, and conveys a real caring for the people on the streets. The homeless are out there right now, suffering. It's important for us to know about them, to be reminded of them, to be confronted with them in our comfortable offices and living rooms just as we are when scurrying about on the street. But we are not New York City, nor should we be. We have no Wall Street, no Madison Avenue, no Times Square. Carson Daily doesn't live here. But just as it is not New York, it is not Amsterdam or Berkeley, either. San Francisco is a unique place, and it demands a unique solution.
We are all castoffs and vagabonds, to an extent. And we must develop our own solutions, and recognize that playing partisans and sticking to dogma--be they NYC-style get-tough tactics or grad-school theorizing--does nothing but make the problem worse for everyone. Allowing the status-quo to continue is just as heartless as anything Newsom and company have proposed. Whoever becomes mayor must have the courage to tackle this issue by exercising independent thought, and being captive to neither the draconian restaurant-hotel interests nor the do-nothing progressive base.
Gonzalez has already shown himself to be such a leader. He's unafraid to stand alone, to take actions that could jeopardize his standing with his liberal base (his mere entry into the race demonstrates this). Newsom, despite the grandstanding, represents four more years of downtown, business-interest, machine politics--the last eight years of which have led us where we are today.
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes. Something must be done. But Newsom is not the man to do it.
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