Tent City by the Bay
San Francisco must embrace a new approach to its homeless street population.March 5, 2019
Cities
The Social Order
https://www.city-jrnal.org/san-francisco-homeless-problem?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=30e87e4d7e-
San Francisco’s homeless problem has become so grim that tourists wonder if they’ve just wandered into a seedy neighborhood. Last year, a Reddit user posted that he had “walked past numerous homeless” people who were “screaming and running all over the sidewalk near Twitter HQ.” He asked, “Is this normal or am I in a ‘bad part of town?’”
The City by the Bay’s homelessness problem is profound even for California, where as much as 30 percent of the country’s homeless live. Municipal officials estimate that 5,823 such persons live in San Francisco, but health-care workers say the more accurate figure is about 10,000, which would be nearly 72 percent higher than the 2010 federal count. Whatever the true number, the city’s homeless problem is unsustainable.
The “streets are so filthy,” National Public Radio reports, “that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.” A resident living in the South of Market neighborhood has documented an increase in Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. A year ago, the local NBC affiliate surveyed 153 blocks in downtown San Francisco over three days and found that while “some streets were littered with items as small as a candy wrapper, the vast majority of trash found included large heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk,” as well as “100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown.” The survey was not confined to the shabby parts of town, covering also “popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains” as well as “City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.” The accumulation of human feces has become nearly as much a symbol of San Francisco as streetcars, Lombard Street, and the Coit Tower. Complaints made about human waste in public spaces have spiked in recent years, growing from 1,748 in 2008 to 21,000 in 2017; they totaled 20,400 through the first 10 months of 2018, according to Data San Francisco, a city government source.
The long-term solution, some say, is to expand the housing stock in a city where lodgings have become unaffordable for many. Today’s crisis, says Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute, also requires short-term strategies that give the homeless access to shelters and services that help them transition off the streets. But adding more apartments won’t do anything to address the city’s escalating homelessness problem, much of which is caused by drug addiction and mental illness, and strategies like those Winegarden champions have been tried for decades, without much success.
Doug Wyllie, a San Francisco resident and law enforcement trainer, suggests involving police officers, but not in the way many might expect. Officers are on the “front lines of a war,” Wyllie wrote last July in POLICE magazine, but it’s one that they are “ill-equipped to win.” What they need is better knowledge of available social services, because police don’t automatically “know that the building down on Third and Main has a clinic offering mental health counseling to underprivileged individuals.” Once familiar with available resources, says Wyllie, cops can connect the homeless with appropriate services and treatment.
Santa Rosa, 40 miles north of San Francisco, started a program that fits Wyllie’s description. The Homeless Outreach Services Team is operated by Catholic Charities and works with the Santa Rosa Police Department to direct the homeless to service centers and find them housing. While “housing first” efforts have proved largely ineffectual, the Santa Rosa initiative has fared better: during 2016–2017, nearly all the 875 homeless who made contact with the city’s police force were placed either in safe shelter or permanent or transitional housing. In 2017–18, roughly three-quarters of the more than 2,000 homeless people who had contact with police were placed in shelter or housing. It’s too early to know if such an approach will work long-term, but San Francisco should give Santa Rosa’s program a look.
Advocacy groups, wanting little more than to “preserve the status quo,” often thwart progress on reducing homelessness, says Erica Sandberg, a San Francisco resident who recently wrote about the effects of open drug use in the streets. The advocates hold enormous political clout in San Francisco and have been behind City Hall’s enabling response to homelessness for decades. Sandberg, an activist seeking solutions to the city’s homelessness and crime issues, says that the groups are starting to lose influence because residents are finally getting fed up with the disorder and disruption on their doorsteps. With more public support, private institutions with more constructive approaches may get their opportunity, which cannot come soon enough for San Francisco residents.
MEX MURDERS MOTHER IN PELOSI, FEINSTEIN, KAMALA
HARRIS, GAVIN NEWSOM'S ! SANCTUARY ! CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO!
*
Steinle’s
murderer, Jose Zarate and been deported 5xs!
*
"While walking with her father on a pier
in San Francisco in 2015, Steinle was shot by the illegal alien. Steinle
pleaded with her father to not let her die, but she soon passed in her father’s
arms."
*
In the last two years, ICE officers made
266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or
convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 s ex crimes, and 4,000 violent k illings.
Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally k illed by those who
illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we
don't act right now.
THE STAGGERING COST OF THE WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND
THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE BUILT BORDER to OPEN BORDER’
According
to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s
2017 report, illegal
immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers a net $116 billion
annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien annually. While high, this number is not
an outlier: a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants
(including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the course of their
lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics Editorial found that illegal immigration
costs America over $140 billion annually. As it stands, illegal immigrants are
a massive burden on American taxpayers.
THE BILLIONAIRE
CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is using
the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor
programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that
salaries are too
damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON
CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart
JAMES WALSH
THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY’S HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA… first ease millions of illegals over our borders and into our voting
booths!
How the Democrat party
surrendered America to Mexico:
“The watchdogs
at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama
administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices
Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington
Times
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the
Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN,
belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and
California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers
via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney
General Eric Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of
migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per
year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials
only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two
pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
“The cost
of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit.
Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President
Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3
million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy
Institute.”
LEGALS FLEE THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE!
MEXIFORNIA: The Globalist Democrat
Party’s Vision of America
*
Migrant enclaves already are at the top
of the U.S. lists for bad places to live - 10 of the 50 worst places
in America to live according to this list are in
California, and all of them are famous for their illegal
populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
*
*
California—not Mississippi, New
Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States.
According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts
for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes
noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four
Californians is poor. Kerry Jackson
*
California’s de facto
status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a
permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance
in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long
been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political
price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers
remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove
California to its golden years. Kerry Jackson
*
As Breitbart
News reported, if chain migration
is not ended — as President Donald Trump has demanded — the U.S. electorate
will forever be changed, with between seven to eight million new foreign-born
individuals being eligible to vote because of chain migration, and overall, an
additional 15 million new foreign-born voters.
*
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas
identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of
immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new
immigration-detention facilities in favor of the
old “catch and release” policy for
illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than
compromise on mass amnesty.
*
No Justice for Taxpaying Americans
By Howie Carr
But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get.
By Howie Carr
But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get.
*
Illegal
aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted
public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety
for all citizens. Arthur
Schaper
*
The costs of illegal
immigration are being carefully hidden by
Democrats. MONICA SHOWALTER
*
The Federation for American
Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government
services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and
criminal justice system costs. STEVEN
BALDWIN
*
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan
Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of
all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in
2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that
in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were
illegal aliens.
Bay Area's High Cost Of Living Squeezes Restaurant Workers, Chefs And Owners
Every morning at around 5 a.m., Armando Ibarra wakes up in the back of his van. He has been living there for the past couple of years. On his dashboard rests a holy candle. A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror.
Ibarra walks over to his job at a chain hotel near San Francisco's airport. He says that at least he can wash up there. "I take a shower, drink my coffee, smoke a cigarette and ready to work."
The hotel restaurant where Ibarra works as a food runner boasts creative, artisanal and healthy meals. People in the San Francisco Bay Area are known for being foodies (the city now has the most Michelin three-star restaurants in the U.S.).
But behind kitchen doors, tension has been stewing for years: Service-industry workers like Ibarra say they can no longer afford to live in the Bay Area on their wages. And restaurant owners say the high cost of living has made it hard to retain staff and even to stay in business.
The Bay Area is notoriously expensive. As the tech industry grows, rents have soared. A one-bedroom apartment costs well over $3,000 a month. The minimum wage just went up to $15 an hour, but the cost of living also keeps rising.
Ibarra makes around $15 an hour. He used to commute from neighboring San Jose, one of the most expensive cities in the United States. He paid $800 a month for a room, but just slept there.
When traffic was bad, the drive back from work could take as much as three hours. "You would go bumper-to-bumper, bumper-to-bumper sometimes. You get crazy," Ibarra says.
He considered renting near work. But he couldn't afford it. He figured he was already spending as much as four hours a day in his vehicle, so he might as well just sleep there.
The plight of low-wage workers like Ibarra is affecting the restaurant business. Just last year, several high-profile eateries shut down. One of them was Camino, known for its wood-fired cuisine. Co-owner Allison Hopelain says the restaurant took a major hit when its chef moved to Seattle because he couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.
"[He] felt like he would have better opportunities there in terms of opening his own place, buying a home," Hopelain says. She says things started unraveling when he left. Last year, after about a decade in business, Camino closed.
Hopelain went on to open The Kebabery in Oakland. It's a small, cafeteria-style joint. You just pick your food and find a table. She says it's a much more affordable business model, but she also thinks it's what a lot of customers want.
Decades ago, eating out was a special occasion, but these days Hopelain says people want to grab a quick, affordable bite of good food and head back to their lives.
A few minutes north of Oakland, Peter Levitt says his restaurant, Saul's, with waiters, hosts and food runners, is part of a dying breed. "Your old diners with booths and breakfast and lunch table service — it's over," he says.
Saul's, a Jewish deli, is a landmark in Berkeley near the University of California campus. Professors and locals hold meetings in the cozy booths over bagels, blintzes, smoked fish and warm matzo ball soup.
Saul's was established in the 1980s, and Levitt has seen a change in the cost of living here unfold before his eyes. With workers getting pushed out of the Bay Area, he says, "we've seen our staff coming from further and further away." One of his cooks sleeps at his extended family's house nearby, on workdays, to shorten his commute.
Levitt says Saul's might have to adapt to the changing times. "As minimum wages go up, and particularly as housing prices go up, the menu prices have to go up, because you have to pay more to retain your labor force," he says. "And at some point maybe there won't be enough clientele out there to pay the cost of table service to sustain this kind of restaurant."
Some restaurants in the area are even turning to automation. Located in San Francisco's Financial District, Creator offers burgers created by local celebrity chefs.
But the burgers are made by a giant robot that slices the brioche bun, grates the cheese and cuts the tomatoes. The end result: a $6 burger.
Alex Vardakostas grew up flipping patties at his parents' restaurant, a burger joint in a little California surf town. He says the robot can flip burgers better, and more cheaply.
"The only way you can make a burger of this kind of quality at that price is using a device that's going to grind meat to order. It's going to slice the tomato to order, slice the bun to order," Vardakostas says.
Meanwhile, at the hotel restaurant where Ibarra works, a burger costs about $20.
"You know, even when I get the discount, that's too much," he says.
He says he usually just goes to Burger King or Taco Bell or stops by a gas station to eat before heading back to his van to sleep.
By Kate Randall
“Deaths of despair” continue to soar
US deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide at all-time high
By Kate Randall
8 March 2019
More than 150,000 Americans died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicide in 2017. This is more than twice as many as in 1999 and the highest number since recordkeeping began in that year. This skyrocketing rate of so-called deaths of despair was confirmed in a new analysis released this week by Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and Well Being Trust (WBT).
TFAH and WBT analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2016 and 2017 and found that the national rate for deaths due to alcohol, drugs and suicide increased 6 percent over that year, from 43.9 deaths per 100,000 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000. While the rate of increase is lower than in the previous two years, it is still higher than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.
The new analysis provides insight into the CDC’s findings last years that showed a drop in life expectancy from 78.7 years to 78.6 years, the third consecutive year-on-year decline. In the years since the 2008 financial crisis many workers and their families have confronted an unprecedented crisis of social misery, which is literally cutting life out from under them.
Certain groups of Americans have been hardest hit by the “deaths of despair” examined in the new analysis:
• Ages 35–54: The rate of death from alcohol, drugs and suicide was 72.4 per 100,000. This was a 35 percent increase over 2007 figures.
• Males of all ages: A death rate of 68.2 deaths per 100,000 was found among men.
• Regional disparities: West Virginia, with 81 deaths per 100,000, and New Mexico, with 77, had the highest rates of “deaths of despair” among the 50 US states.
Death by suicide
The suicide rate in 2017 was 4 percent higher than in 2016, rising from 13.9 deaths per 100,000 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000. In 2017, 47,200 Americans died as a result of suicide. Deaths by suicide were particularly high among males (22.9 per 100,000), whites (16.6 per 100,000) and people living in rural areas (19.4 per 100,000)
Over the past decade suicide rates increased by 22 percent. Suffocation and hanging suicides have risen by 42 percent since 2008, while firearm suicides saw a 22 percent increase. These methods are often chosen by suicide victims over less violent means because they are more likely to result in death.
One of the most disturbing trends over the last decade has been the rise is deaths by children ages 1–17. Although suicide deaths in 2017 were still lower than for other age groups, at 2.4 per 100,000, they have risen by 16 percent since 2016. Over the last decade, 12,660 youth under the age of 17 took their own lives, according to the CDC.
Suicide rates over the past decade have also increased proportionally more among blacks (30 percent rise) and Latinos (36 percent) than among other racial and ethnic groups.
Research published by the CDC last year showed that the overall suicide rate increased by 25 percent across the US over the two decades ending in 2016. These figures paint a picture of a social crisis driving increasing numbers of people, both young and old, to take their own lives in the face of personal crises, mental health issues, substance abuse and economic despair.
In 2017, 35,800 Americans died of alcohol-induced causes. The TFAH/WBT report included deaths from alcohol induced causes, including alcohol poisoning, liver and other diseases. It did not include alcohol-related vehicle accidents, violence or accidental fatalities.
Alcohol-induced deaths rose 2 percent in 2017 over 2016, the smallest increase since 2008–2009. The alcohol death rate has increase by 38 percent since 2008. Alcohol-related deaths were highest among males (16.2 per 100,000), whites (12.2 per 100,000), adults ages 55–74 (26.4 per 100,000) and in rural areas (13 per 100,000).
People 55–74, who should be enjoying their retirement, instead are abusing alcohol in record numbers. Those 18–34—who should be gainfully employed, studying or embarking on new careers—have seen a 69 percent rise in alcohol-related deaths over the past decade, as they suffer through unemployment, layoffs and drown in college debt.
Drug deaths
The synthetic opioids fentanyl and carfentanil are 50 to 100 times and 10,000 times more potent than morphine, respectively. Natural/semisynthetic opioids include hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine and heroin.
Two decades ago, synthetic opioids were responsible for less than 10 percent of all drug deaths in the US. In 2017, they accounted for 38 percent of all drug deaths, with an average of 547 Americans succumbing to opioid overdose deaths every week .
The synthetic opioid crisis has taken its toll on every segment of American society, but has especially hit males (with 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2017), blacks (8.6 deaths per 100,000), whites (9.5 deaths per 100,000), adults ages 18–54 (15.2 deaths per 100,000) and those living in metropolitan areas.
A recent study showed that opioid overdose death rates among US teens and children have tripled over the past 17 years. The study, published online in JAMA Network Open, found that young children died from either accidentally ingesting narcotics or from intentional poisoning. Teens more often died from unintentional overdoses, using prescription painkillers found in their homes or drugs bought on the streets.
The Northeast region had the highest opioid mortality rate in 2017 (15.7 deaths per 100,000), followed by the Midwest (12.1 deaths per 100,000). Drug deaths in the Midwest, which includes the Rust Belt ravaged by industrial decline, saw a 122 percent increase in all drug deaths from 2007 to 2017.
The surge in synthetic drug deaths must be laid at the feet of the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, who have flooded neighborhoods with these potent opioids. Drug companies have pushed prescription narcotics through bribing doctors to prescribe the addictive substances, and by secretly and deliberately increasing their addictive properties.
While politicians of both big business parties have feigned outrage at such practices, they are on the payroll of Big Pharma, receiving millions of dollars from drug company lobbyists. In 2018 alone, the pharmaceutical and health products industry spent a record $280 million on their lobbying efforts.
The war against the health and lives of American workers has been a bipartisan conspiracy conducted over decades as part of a conscious strategy to claw back the gains of the working class begun over a century ago.
For the 150,000 Americans who died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicides in 2017, millions more have been affected—family, friends, co-workers. But for politicians in Congress and pharmaceutical CEOs this devastating toll is seen as the “cost of doing business.”
The US health care crisis—exemplified by these “deaths of despair” and falling life-expectancy—is a true national emergency, in contrast to the “national emergency” on the Southern US border fabricated by Donald Trump and his fascistic advisers.
The epidemic of alcohol-, drug- and suicide-related deaths is a social crisis that requires a socialist response. Such social misery cannot be battled under conditions where the health and welfare of the vast majority is subjugated to the private wealth of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and giant healthcare chains. These capitalist enterprises must be expropriated, transformed into public utilities and run on the basis of social need, not profit.
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