Tom Fuller is one of the best reporters at The New York Times. He covered the Arab Spring in North Africa. He covered the military junta in Myanmar, sneaking over the Thai border. His life work deserves a Pulitzer, and now we're lucky to have him in SF. I've worked with him directly, and he's the real deal and also a nice guy.
The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?
When you think about San Francisco, you think about tech and homelessness. It's a city that's the seat of a global industry trying to grapple with a regional problem. That is, both the tech and the homelessness are part of larger systems over which San Francisco has little control.
The city has more to offer the homeless than many other US cities: weather that won't kill you, laws that support free healthcare, a citizenry that, until recently at least, believed the problem should not be swept under the rug or erased like LA took care of Skid Row.
But the weird thing about SF is how the city is becoming more and more disjointed. It has become a city that attracts people from around the world with economic opportunity. The tech workers that form the middle and upper middle class here don't have much else in common besides the economic opportunity they sought. They didn't come to solve homelessness in SF, and we can't blame them for that. And the homeless themselves come from many other places in the US.
So tech workers and homeless come to a city, but many of them are not from here, and therefore don't identify as belonging to the same community, a community which under other historical conditions might have tried to care for itself and solve its own problems.
I'm aware of a few attempts in SF to address homelessness: Handup, LavaMae, etc. And they're great, but they aren't the norm for tech.
There's also something strange about tech as an industry, which shapes its impact on SF. Older industries like carmakers employed hundreds of thousands of people, and employed them locally (at least until NAFTA). That is, organizations devoted to the accumulation of capital were also the source of a lot of employment in the cities where they were based.
Tech is different. Google employs an order of magnitude less than that. And it is addressing a global market rather than a national or local one. The bits at the base of its business have no ties to SF. It's solving problems and offering services worldwide, and doesn't really have to think much about the state and fate of the local economy. Maybe that's just the weirdness of globalization.
It seems the entire Bay Area is from someplace else, myself included. I landed at San Jose Airport from Illinois in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake.
In 2010, 31% of the residents of Alameda county, home of Berkeley, Oakland and Fremont, were born in a different country. Another 3rd, like me, were American born outside the State of California. I'd wager that less than 10% of the residents of Alameda County were born in Alameda County (the remaining from some other part of California).
I'm not sure how that stacks up to other parts of the US, but in Boise, for example, 7% of the population is foreign born [0].
Is SF simply the capital of homelessness, the same way New York is the theater capital and Washington is the government capital and LA is the movie capital?
He says SF has six times as many homeless as Bangkok, but maybe SF is just attracting homeless people from a wide radius because it's a nicer place to be homeless.
Year-round mild weather is a big factor in "homeless capital" status. There are plenty of other factors, though. Cool cities, cities where people in general want to live, have a lot more homeless folks; of the places I've been, homelessness was most common in the "great" cities: Austin, SF, Portland, San Diego, Dallas, NYC.
But they have other commonalities: They're expensive to live in, and owning or renting a home in those places is more expensive than a lot of surrounding cities. They have an existing community of homeless folks, and it's easier to live homeless if you're not alone.
I know a bunch of street kids and traveling kids, who choose homelessness (or, at least don't try very hard to not be homeless from day to day). There's a list of places they travel among, particularly down the west coast. Seattle, Portland, Eugene, trimming weed in northern California, SF, Venice Beach, Slab City. Sometimes, they go for specific opportunities. Sometimes, they go for easy access to drugs (Eugene is infamous for easy access to psychadelics, and the old home of Ken Kesey and the Pranksters). Sometimes they go because that's where they can jump on and off of trains or where they can hitch a ride to/from.
Very small towns are viewed as a really bad idea for homeless folks for the same reasons. It's hard to hitch a ride out when there's only a half dozen people leaving town each day. It's hard to find food, drugs, money, a safe place to sleep, when there aren't a lot of people walking around shopping and such, or other homeless folks to interact with. Police in small towns often feel empowered to be more aggressive with homeless populations, because they're often alone or in small groups, and the local populace is already suspicious of outsiders, so very little pressure to not treat homeless folks terribly. It's dangerous to be homeless in many small towns.
So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons for SF to have a big homeless population. Partly it's just that SF has a large population in general (for its size); dense cities have dense and visible homeless populations. It isn't "The Capital" for homeless folks, but it definitely has a larger than average homeless population for a city of its size.
> so very little pressure to not treat homeless folks terribly
I'd go even further - the locals put pressure on the police specifically to treat homeless folks terribly.
I live in a suburb of Portland. There are a lot of homeless people in the city, and the folks in the suburbs view the police as the only thing keeping their nice towns from being overrun by bums. As a result, the sheriff's platform is aggressive, the mayor's platform is aggressive, and the police chief who is appointed by the mayor is aggressive. Being the suburban Charlie Hales is a very bad idea if you want to stay in office.
The next town over is even more aggressive due to being even closer to Portland - bums who get picked up usually spend the police officer's entire shift handcuffed in the back of the squad car. The message is clear. Get the fuck out of our town, go back to Portland where you belong. Or Gresham.
> Austin, SF, Portland, San Diego, Dallas, NYC.
> But they have other commonalities: They're expensive to live in, and owning or renting a home in those places is more expensive than a lot of surrounding cities
While Dallas is more expensive than the rural cities and towns not far away, the real estate market in it (median home price around $150k) is a night and day comparison with cities like SF and NYC.
That's true. There's a big difference between "expensive for Texas" and expensive on the west coast or in NYC. Still, a house or apartment in downtown Dallas (where the homeless folks are living) is nowhere near $150k.
I'm not sure what's causation, and what's merely coincidence, when it comes to "expensive places have more homeless people". It may just be that density correlates with both for a variety of reasons. If you don't have transportation and need to eat every day, being in a metropolitan area is pretty much mandatory. Those also happen to be the most expensive to live in.
I'm sure that's true of Houston, Indianapolis, Detroit, Tulsa, etc. However, I think there's some unique elements in SF beyond just being an expensive city.
Central Florida has a lot of homeless and near-homeless people. Some of that is mental illness, some people are just "outside dogs" and some of it is veterans.
When the bits become tied to the region somehow, like better transport through autonomous cars, maybe there will be more of an incentive for tech companies to invest like how Rockefeller pushed for mandatory public education to create the next generation of obedient, literate, factory workers and how Ford built an entire city around his manufacturing plants and created the idea of weekends and minimum wage in order to reduce turnovers. Nothing like that is happening or happening at scale in tech companies, but it's changing. Incentives are aligning.
>> "The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?"
Isn't this the same for any major city? It doesn't seem like an SF only problem.
I don't think it's a San Francisco problem either.
I don't see it going away.
I have given up on debating it.
I would like to see certain cities/counties in the United States open up areas where people can camp legally. If there's crime problems, law enforcement will help; not harass though.
I know there's a lot of people who will fight it. I'm tired of hearing, "If you build it, they will come."
I'm just asking for a few acres that people can put up a tent, and have access to a few out houses. Maybe a hand washing station? Maybe a few shower heads? I know, enough with the maybes. This is where it gets crazy. I sometimes think they put too many maybes in the debate, so people will just throw up their hands, and do nothing.
For all practical purposes, it's illegial to live without money.
We all can't be expected to move to Alaska, and live off the land. Those days are gone.
I have know people who literally got ticked for sleeping in their vechicles. They were between rentals.
I have known two men who died of pneumonia while living on their boats. No--it can't proven. I just knew the guys, and they died too early. They lived on their boats because they were not economically viable anymore. They didn't have understanding families. They didn't have connections.
This is not the America, I was so proud, of growing up.
(I won't be back to debate. These are not just my wishes. I have a friend who's been homeless for years. The police have harassed him to--someone I don't completely know anymore. He just wants a place to put a tent, and access to a toilet.)
The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?
When you think about San Francisco, you think about tech and homelessness. It's a city that's the seat of a global industry trying to grapple with a regional problem. That is, both the tech and the homelessness are part of larger systems over which San Francisco has little control.
The city has more to offer the homeless than many other US cities: weather that won't kill you, laws that support free healthcare, a citizenry that, until recently at least, believed the problem should not be swept under the rug or erased like LA took care of Skid Row.
But the weird thing about SF is how the city is becoming more and more disjointed. It has become a city that attracts people from around the world with economic opportunity. The tech workers that form the middle and upper middle class here don't have much else in common besides the economic opportunity they sought. They didn't come to solve homelessness in SF, and we can't blame them for that. And the homeless themselves come from many other places in the US.
So tech workers and homeless come to a city, but many of them are not from here, and therefore don't identify as belonging to the same community, a community which under other historical conditions might have tried to care for itself and solve its own problems.
I'm aware of a few attempts in SF to address homelessness: Handup, LavaMae, etc. And they're great, but they aren't the norm for tech.
There's also something strange about tech as an industry, which shapes its impact on SF. Older industries like carmakers employed hundreds of thousands of people, and employed them locally (at least until NAFTA). That is, organizations devoted to the accumulation of capital were also the source of a lot of employment in the cities where they were based.
Tech is different. Google employs an order of magnitude less than that. And it is addressing a global market rather than a national or local one. The bits at the base of its business have no ties to SF. It's solving problems and offering services worldwide, and doesn't really have to think much about the state and fate of the local economy. Maybe that's just the weirdness of globalization.