The City of San Francisco opened its first officially-sanctioned homeless camp this week, located outside City Hall.
The camp, called “Safe Sleeping Village,” includes 80 tents, set up inside rectangles marked in white paint on asphalt, and “provides meals, showers, clean water and trash pickup” to camp residents, according to the Associated Press.
SFGate.com reports that the camp opened May 13 for “individuals who were already established in the City Hall area”
In addition, “Occupants must sign a community guidelines agreement and are expected to meet certain expectations around conduct. Only occupants can enter the site through entrances that are monitored by officials 24 hours a day.”
Other official homeless camps are to be opened later, to address the problem of crowded informal camps on city streets.
The coronavirus gave new impetus to San Francisco’s experiment with homeless tent cities. As Breitbart News noted in March, both San Francisco and Los Angeles originally planned to move as many homeless people indoors as possible to prevent the spread of the virus in homeless encampments. However, experts soon learned that the virus spread more easily indoors than outdoors, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised against moving the homeless indoors. San Francisco reversed course and encouraged homeless people to stay in tents during the outbreak.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson recently told Breitbart News Daily that homeless tent cities that are set up on public land, and that provide medical services, might be the best way to address the problem.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday
on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER , is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
Senator Dianne Feinstein
Website
SF
Office
(415) 393-0707
DC
Office
(202) 224-3841
Los
Angeles Office
(310) 914-7300
“I look forward to working with you to continue
San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for progress
across America.” I don’t know what definition of “progress” Pelosi is using,
but any candid observer would rate the city a catastrophe.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S
BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as
Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
1.
Globalism: Google
VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates
around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2.
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic
party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not
a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3. Immigration: Maintaining
liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the
most.
IMAGES OF
AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:
Your neighborhood will be next to fall to LA RAZA!
San Francisco is a disaster about which
Nancy Pelosi she cares nothing. It is a city ravaged
by drug abuse, homelessness, rampant crime and all the other scourges
of leftism. She lives extravagantly in her gated mansion. She
lives a life of wealth and privilege in city suffering
a civilizational collapse created and orchestrated by her own
party. She revels in it. She has become
a near-billionairess by way of politics of the most corrupt
variety. She is indeed a cancer on the body politic. PATRICIA
McCARTHY
"They will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these
plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be
exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who
must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs,
drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt
for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
FLEEING SAN FRANCISCO: A DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED CITY IN MELTDOWN
America’s Havana
Thousands say ciao to San Francisco.
California
Cities
Economy, finance, and budgets
O n January 8, London
Breed, San Francisco’s mayor, was sworn in for her first full term. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet, saying, “I look forward to
working with you to continue San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a
guiding light for progress across America.” I don’t know what definition of
“progress” Pelosi is using, but any candid observer would rate the city a
catastrophe. Mayor Breed was inaugurated on the same day that I moved from San
Francisco to Los Angeles, after ten years working at the cutting edge of science
and technology.
Even
before the current Covid-19 pandemic, San Francisco was a deeply troubled city.
It ranks first in the nation in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and
other property crime. On average, about 60 cars get broken into each day.
Diseases arising from poor sanitation—typhoid, typhus, hepatitis A—are
reappearing at an alarming rate. Fentanyl goes for about $20 a pill on Market
Street, and each year the city hands out 4.5 million needles, which you can
find used and tossed out like cigarette butts in parks and around bus stops.
The city’s department of public works deploys feces cleaners daily—a “poop
patrol” to wash the filth from the sidewalks.
This is
just a brief summary of the lack of hygiene and common decency. A reasonable person
might declare an emergency, but in her first official act, Breed swore in Chesa
Boudin, San Francisco’s new district attorney, before a packed house at the
Herbst Theater. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” said
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a congratulatory video message.
“I hope you reflect as a great beacon to many.” Boudin’s résumé boasts of a
stint working directly for the late dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who
turned a once-rich nation back to the dark ages. “We will not prosecute cases
involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin promised during his campaign. He must
have witnessed the success of that policy in Caracas, which was voted the
world’s most dangerous city in 2018.
Even the
sights and sounds of the city suggest a certain derangement. When the Bay Area
Rapid Transit (BART) system was first built in the 1970s, its designers failed
to understand the acoustics between wheel, track, and tunnel. Since the
nineteenth century, competent railroad engineers have known that a tapered,
flanged wheel will handle turns better and generate less noise. For some
reason, BART designers ignored this design in favor of a cylindrical wheel with
a straight edge. Years of wear and tear have degraded the screech into a mad
howl. According to a recent count by the San Francisco Chronicle , BART has lost nearly 10
million riders on nights and weekends because of the noise, grime, and lack of
safety. It doesn’t help that it has also become a de facto shelter for drug
addicts and the mentally ill.
Today,
it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure
projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van
Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening
is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and
detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was
built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore,
the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
Treasure Island took under three years to finish.
The city
no longer builds housing, either. Due to the nation’s tightest zoning rules and
land-use restrictions, developers struggle mightily to put up new apartments
and houses. Even after getting permission to build—following years of
scrambling through a dysfunctional approval process—it costs about $700,000 to
construct a single new apartment unit. Consequently, the cost of housing has
skyrocketed. The median price for a one-bedroom rental is the most expensive in
the nation, at about $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a family
needs $1.5 million, on average—and they’d better be a cash buyer.
But the
culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the
blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts
this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went
without power for days. Many of the company’s electric lines contain components
that go back to the 1950s; some date to the 1920s. These parts have ignited
1,961 fires since 2014, according to the company. The 2018 Camp Fire, the
deadliest in California’s history, was caused by a broken hook on a tower. It
killed 85 people and torched 150,000 acres; a year later, near Sonoma and Napa,
vineyards burned among 190,000 acres, and 22 people were killed. Smoke drifted
over San Francisco and choked its residents for weeks. For the duration, San
Francisco became one of the most polluted cities in the world. People now stock
up on air filters and masks every October for the season of ash.
San
Francisco is a city overwhelmed by its own stupidity, but painful adjustments
are coming. For the seventh straight year, more people have left California
than have moved in. Tech companies are reconsidering the importance of being in
San Francisco. Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las
Vegas. After nearly 50 years, Charles Schwab is moving its headquarters out of
town. And in a recent earnings call with investors, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO,
said that the company planned to have a more distributed workforce in the
future and be less concentrated in San Francisco. With tech companies operating
remotely while their employees shelter in place, how many of these workers will
return to their San Francisco offices after the Covid-19 crisis subsides is an
open question.
“For the
future to have power over the present, it has to be different from the
present,” Peter Thiel said in a recent interview with Peter Robinson of the
Hoover Institution. “The future has power because it is a time that will look
different.” San Francisco is trapped in the past. The future will be built
elsewhere. I left to find it.
Michael Gibson is a cofounder of 1517
Fund, a venture-capital firm in California.
Free Booze, Pot, and Smokes for San Francisco’s Homeless
A new city program tries to make
quarantine comfortable—for some.
May 11, 2020
Covid-19
California
San Francisco officials
deny direct involvement in a controversial program, funded by private sources,
that provides free alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes to homeless people living
in the city’s hotels during the Covid-19 outbreak. After news about the special
deliveries was leaked and caused embarrassment on social media, the city’s
Department of Public Health issued a statement claiming that “rumors that
guests of San Francisco’s alternative housing program are receiving
taxpayer-funded deliveries of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco are false.”
Except they’re not false.
DPH, which administers and oversees the program, is staffed by city workers,
including doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, and security
personnel. The department manages, stores, and distributes the substances.
Employee time is involved. Thus, the program is financed by taxpayers, even if an
outside group provides some of the funding. According to DPH spokesperson Jenna
Lane, the philanthropists who helped purchase the substances wish to remain
anonymous.
The program’s primary
purpose is to keep homeless people, the majority of whom are addicts, out of
harm’s way during the pandemic. By getting their substance of choice delivered,
the thinking goes, the guests may be more apt to remain in their
government-funded rooms. Another purpose of the program is to protect the
public against the spread of coronavirus. The city doesn’t want homeless people
who should be staying in their rooms roaming the neighborhood in search of the
substances, potentially infecting others.
“Managed alcohol and
tobacco use makes it possible to increase the number of guests who stay in
isolation and quarantine and, notably, protects the health of people who might
otherwise need hospital care for life-threatening alcohol withdrawal,” says
Lane.
Lane concedes that the
provision of substances is not necessarily meant to save people from dangerous,
unsupervised detoxification. The homeless are screened to determine what
substances they would prefer to have on hand and might be uncomfortable
without. “Many isolation and quarantine guests tell us they use these
substances daily,” says Lane, “and this period in our care has allowed some
people to connect for the first time with addiction treatment and harm reduction
therapy.” But DPH has not made clear which addiction-recovery services are
offered and whether anyone has used them. In any case, “harm-reduction therapy”
is about reducing the negative consequences associated with drug use, not about
recovering from addiction.
The details of the
free-substances program—to the extent that they have been disclosed—are
fascinating. Alcohol is served with meals (those, too, are provided at no cost
to guests), and the DPH, in consultation with doctors, determines how much each
person gets. Does a physician write a script for a daily dose of five Sierra
Nevadas, seven shots of Tito’s, or a fine bottle of Sangiovese? And who does
the shopping? The DPH doesn’t say.
DPH workers assist in
purchasing cannabis for guests who prefer that drug. Ostensibly, the purpose is
for medical use, though physicians are prohibited from prescribing cannabis,
and insurance doesn’t cover it. In California, the average price for an ounce
of median-grade marijuana is $207.
Guests who enjoy a good
smoke receive cigarettes, divided up by medical staff and handed out in
Ziploc-type bags. The number they’re allotted is “determined by physicians who
calculate the minimum possible to achieve the public health goals of isolation
and quarantine,” says Lane. When questioned about whether these guests receive
premium or generic brands, Lane said that doctors determine the quality. Almost
all hotel rooms in San Francisco are normally smoke-free, but these rules have
apparently been suspended, at least for the city-funded guests.
One would think that DPH
would require that guests gifted such substances remain quarantined, but the
city is merely requesting that they do so. “The City of San Francisco is asking
guests of isolation and quarantine sites to remain in their rooms,” says Lane.
“DPH is managing the use of these substances so a guest does not have to leave
to obtain them.” Security guards aren’t monitoring doors, and no one is locked
in.
The program ensures the
protection of neither the homeless hotel guests nor the general public. San
Francisco taxpayers are footing the bill for people to drink, smoke, and get
high while living in a hotel for free. It’s no surprise that the Department of
Public Health and its mysterious donors sought to keep details of the program
on the down-low.
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