San Francisco’s Substance-Abuse Crisis
A hotels-for-homeless program does nothing to address the real problem: addiction.April 26, 2021The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square. It’s to the city’s large and gritty sixth district, which contains the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. What you’ll find there will shatter any preconceived notions about homelessness you might have heard from activists, city departments, and elected officials. You’ll realize that San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem—it has a substance-abuse crisis. And Project Roomkey, California governor Gavin Newsom’s hotels-for-homeless plan that he’s touting as a model for the rest of the country, won’t help any more than a band-aid will cure a cancer patient.
Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.
Your immediate reaction will probably be grief and horror. How can we treat our fellow human beings so cruelly, and how did we, as a society, allow things to get this bad? If we can’t admit these individuals into hospitals today, we should at least erect mobile hospitals to deliver critical medical, psychiatric, and addiction treatment before it’s too late.
Yet Newsom has declared that with programs like Project Roomkey, the United States can solve homelessness. To see the results of the program is to know what a bizarre claim this is. While a small portion of the unhoused are healthy enough to shift into and benefit from such housing, the vast majority are not—and their troubles won’t be alleviated by a hotel room.
San Francisco launched Project Roomkey last year, ostensibly as a way to thwart the spread of Covid-19. At last count, approximately 8,000 people live on San Francisco’s streets, and starting in April 2020, a few thousand were routed to leased “shelter-in-place” (SIP) hotels and motels. However, since so many were living outside as a direct result of substance use (or mental illnesses associated with or exacerbated by it), lethal drug activity flourished in and around the buildings.
Then came the body count. In 2020, San Francisco saw 713 fatal drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl. Nearly three-quarters perished while isolated inside the hotel rooms and supportive housing provided by the city. Six died in the Hotel Whitcomb, a designated SIP hotel, in a single month.
The reason: Project Roomkey hotels offer no addiction-recovery treatment or mental health care. Nor is there a sobriety requirement. Residents do, however, get plenty of fresh needles, fentanyl foil, and other drug supplies, courtesy of the harm-reduction teams. As Dr. Hali Hammer of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health admitted in an April 2021 New York Times story on the city’s epidemic of drug fatalities, “What we as the public health department are responsible for is preventing death by giving people the resources they need to use safely.” The entire system erodes the desire and willpower to accept detox and rehab. It’s easier and less painful, at least in the short term, to use in a hotel.
Crime has also surged around the SIP motels and hotels, as people score from dealers just outside the lobbies. Shootings, robberies, and car break-ins have become commonplace, as have open-air drug use and sexual acts performed in broad daylight—an alarming change for neighborhoods like the Marina, which not long ago did not have a high population of unhoused, addicted people.
Now Project Roomkey is transitioning from leasing rooms in hotels and motels to purchasing buildings and converting them into permanent housing for unsheltered individuals. Funds are suddenly flowing for the program. FEMA offered partial funding, but earlier this year President Biden signed an executive order directing the federal government to reimburse program costs fully.
Newsom and San Francisco officials are aware that Project Roomkey does nothing to heal homelessness because the absence of a home isn’t the real sickness. The self-described experts will continue to blame income inequality, lack of affordable housing, or class and racial disparities. They won’t admit—at least not publicly—that the problem is almost entirely driven by addiction.
Meantime, the tide of people coming into the city, drawn by easy access to cheap, potent narcotics, will continue unabated. Some may get a hotel room, but most will become fixtures on the streets. Few, if any, will get better. Based on current projections, more than 1,000 people will die from overdose in 2021. Their descent will be both agonizing and inhumane.
It doesn’t have to be this way in San Francisco, in California generally, or across the United States. Funds allocated to programs like Project Roomkey should go toward providing vital medical, psychological, and addiction treatment to those in desperate need. Go ahead. Call it a pipe dream.
New Era of Remote Workers Spawns Domestic Migration as Small Towns Offer Financial, Other Incentives
The coronavirus pandemic that kept people locked in their homes for months turns out to have inspired a new wave of domestic migration as cities across the country offer incentives to remote workers ranging from cash to free recreational opportunities.
Bill Oesterle, co-founder and former CEO of Angie’s List and the co-founder of MakeMyMove, wrote about how his company connects remote workers with communities that want to attract new residents.
Oesterie’s op-ed in USA Today explains how the pandemic has put a new twist on economic development:
The term “talent-driven economic development” has become increasingly popular in city halls and statehouses over the past 10 years. Books like “The Rise of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida ignited enthusiastic discussions at economic development organizations across the country. In the Midwest and Northeast where demographic forces are causing serious work force problems, the focus on talent has become the most acute.
Unfortunately, no one had the foggiest notion how to do it. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of existing economic development programs focus on attracting companies and the jobs that they create. Jobs attract talent. It has always worked that way.
Then millions of remote workers popped up and many of those will continue to work from home, even after the coronavirus is behind us.
The op-ed continues:
As communities begin to understand this value, it is likely that they will design programs to explore it. Ten thousand dollars may not be enough to move people at the margin, but $100,000 or more just might. At this point, no community has taken a big swing at attracting remote workers with major incentives and sophisticated targeting and marketing.
If that happens, the results could be dramatic. Recruiting 5,000 to 10,000 new remote workers to a local community is now feasible and would have a much more significant and immediate impact than traditional corporate subsidies. If efforts like this gain scale, geographically fixed workers might realize the substantial value they could capture if they moved to remote work, adding additional fuel to this paradigm-changing pandemic.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the phenomenon:
For towns and counties, it’s well worth forking out money to diversify their populations and boost their economies. New residents patronize local restaurants and stores, pay taxes, enroll their kids in schools and may volunteer or immerse themselves in civic activities.
To be sure, all the relocation incentives have fine print. They require income verification and proof that the new residents can work remotely. Some require buying a house … all want at least a year’s residency; some mandate two years. All limit how many folks they can accept.
Some programs include quirky local bonuses. Topeka, Kansas, throws in a year’s worth of Jimmy John sandwiches; northwest Arkansas springs for a mountain bike; West Virginia offers free whitewater rafting, skiing, rock climbing and rafting. Many places include a concierge service to support new residents, access to a co-working space and networking events.
Evan Hock, co-founder with Oesterle of MakeMyMove.com, said in the Chronicle report:
Many of these communities historically have been fly-over towns. Maybe they lost population in the last decade; growth has slowed. Brand-new citizens bring a lot of income and spending that is enormously valuable as it trickles through the economy.
“It’s a magical strategic intersection of new workforce trends and a shift in geographic preferences,” Brad Smith, Intuit’s former CEO, and currently executive chair of its board and chair of the Nordstrom board, said.
“Rural has become the new urban,” Smith said. “People want to be part of that Hallmark lifestyle in communities where they have a chance to know other people.”
Smith and his wife started a business, Ascend WV, that offers $12,000 cash, a year’s worth of free outdoor activities, and co-working space to selected people who move to West Virginia.
“Over the next five years, they aim to lure 1,000 remote workers, starting this year with 50 in Morgantown,” the Chronicle reported.
Some of the other moving incentive programs include:
- Lauderdale and Colbert counties in Alabama have the Remote Shoals program that offers a $10,000 incentive. The median home price in those locations is $175,000.
- Michigan’s Berrien County launched Move to Michigan, which offers $10,000 to selected new residents states, plus another $5,000 if they enrolled a child in public schools. The full reward requires buying a house for at least $200,000 and staying for at least two years.
- A variety of small towns in Iowa, Kansas and Texas offer free lots, valued at about $3,000, to new residents who want to build a house.
- OpportunityMaine offers up to $367 a month in state tax credits for recent college grads to pay off their student loans. It also offers networking for folks considering a relocation to get questions answered.
- Tulsa Remote, started in late 2018, has paid $10,000 to more than 700 people, many of whom moved to the northeast Oklahoma city with spouses, children and other family members.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio’s NYC Sees 46 Shootings During One Week
There were 46 separate shooting incidents for the seven day time-frame ending Sunday evening in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s (D) New York City.
The New York Post reported that the 46 shooting incidents resulted in 50 victims.
There were 12 shootings with 14 victims during the same week in 2020.
The New York Police Department showed 376 shootings in the city so far this year, with 416 victims.
On April 20, 2021, the Post noted de Blasio was dealing with the violence by reassigning police officers, as he did last year. However, he is reassigning 200 officers versus the 300 he reassigned last year.
Moreover, after the 300 officers were reallocated, gun violence surged in the reassignment areas during 2020.
New York adopted a massive body of gun controls in 2013 under the auspices of the SAFE Act. Those controls include universal background checks, a ban on “high capacity” magazines, an “assault weapons” ban, firearm registration requirements, as well as ammunition registration.
The New York Government’s webpage notes the state also has a red flag law, which took effect August 24, 2019.
Despite all these gun controls, which are the very same controls Democrats seek at the federal level, gun violence in Mayor de Blasio’s NYC is surging.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
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