This sort of thing is liberals achilles heel in my opinion.
So, they bend over backwards to be liberal about homelessness. They let them camp anywhere. By not doing anything about the problem, it gets worse and worse.
I’ve heard that many parts of San Francisco, even some upscale areas, have big numbers of homeless on the streets. And that the air in many places reeks of urine.
S.F. prides itself on being so liberal and progressive, and they are a good case study of, if you subsidize certain behaviors, you get more of it.
I worked in the antique district in downtown San Francisco for a year back in the late 90’s and was shocked at the way the homeless were allowed to take over the public spaces. There was a park with fountain that had a giant abstract sculpture inside of it which had been turned off for some reason. The homeless would climb into it and use it as a toilet.
The smell was revolting and the fountain was littered with fast food wrappers and old news papers that had been used as toilet paper. This trash would blow around and then out of the fountain and into the park where office workers were eating their lunch on the grass.
Addicts were everywhere, incessantly begging for money, fighting with each other, having sex in door ways and dummpsters. Needles lay scattered on the ground were the heroin junkies had dropped them.
One day, while sitting in the park and talking with a friend I happened to glance at a young couple sitting in the grass. Suddenly the young man slumped over and vomited on himself while his companion patted him on the back. It was like this everyday at all hours.
Having moved to the Bay Area from Manhattan I was used to the sights and smells of a big city. But there was something different about the character of the homelessness in San Francisco that struck me immediately. There was a passive acceptance of the problem, a distinct feeling that the city government had simply given up on any on-going attempts to actively combat the problem much less work towards a long term solution. They had surrendered the streets of the city to an insurgent social rot.
The homeless were given free reign to do as they pleased and the productive, tax paying, law abiding residents of the city were told to shut up and deal with it. The homeless were elevated to a privileged status while everyone else was made to suffer quietly the daily spectacle of public spaces overrun with mental disease, drug addiction and criminal behavior.
I left the Bay Area after a year, enriched by my experience despite the obvious decline in public order which had taken root and clearly lowered the quality of life for everyone that lived there. It was puzzling to me how such substandard governmental management had become the norm, and that the people of San Francisco seemed unable to effectively use the powers granted to the local government to address and ameliorate the difficult, yet not hopeless problem homelessness. I understood that the local political culture was unabashedly liberal and proud of it. But what was it about the nature of this culture that created an environment that promoted the mainstreaming of a lax and decadent acceptance of homelessness?
In the end I came to the conclusion that, as a civic institution, the city of San Francisco was suffering from a disease, one symptom of which was the homeless being free to establish themselves on an equal footing with the properly functioning segments of the population. A mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship had developed between the homeless and the iron-like structure of well entrenched progressive ideology. Like remora locked on to the exterior of a shark, the homeless find a perverse form of social acceptance and status in the dystopic embrace of an ideology whose soul was forged by a predatory consciousness dressed up in the flowery rhetoric of selfless social concern.
“I’ve heard that many parts of San Francisco, even the upscale areas, have big numbers of homeless on the streets. And that the air in many places reeks of urine.”
Urine? That’s so yesterday.
http://newsmachete.com/?news=430