TAYFUN COSKUN
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — On June 8, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office held a press conference announcing they will send 130 deputies to arrest people who “use drugs in public.” They plan to concentrate these arrests where lots of people live on the streets. Corporate media parrots the narrative that houseless people are “criminals” and addicts, and the way to deal with the growing crisis of homelessness and despair is jail. Experts on addiction agree that this approach will be ineffective in getting people into treatment and recovery.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced last year that the Tenderloin – near downtown where SRO (single room occupancy) hotels are concentrated – would be swept of tents on its sidewalks. The rents even in these fleabag rooms have gone up so much that people on disability or Social Security, and even many workers, can no longer afford them. This only compounds the misery, as people sleep (and die) on the bare pavement below glittering glass condo towers, and in doorways of the many closed-down store-fronts and businesses.
Politicians and media try to convince us that the unhoused, the worst victims of the ongoing economic crisis, are the cause of the decimation of the businesses that now stand empty and the exit of corporations such as Twitter and Salesforce from the city, as they lay off tens of thousands of workers due to the economy, automation, and AI.
In the largest survey of homeless Californians in decades, done by the University of California at San Francisco, the leading cause of homelessness was overwhelmingly found to be the crushingly high rents and unaffordable housing, and lack of meaningful help getting rehoused once housing is lost, despite millions of dollars spent on “homeless services” (mainly shelters and policing). Ninety percent of these homeless are from California, and a majority cited loss or reduction of income for their loss of housing. A majority said a mere $300 a month would help get them off the street. More than half are 50 years old and above, with Black and Native American populations overrepresented.
Instead of housing people, or using tax revenues to build housing affordable for low-or no-income people, a few crowded and un-safe shelters are maintained, at great cost to taxpayers. Despite an injunction by a federal judge that forbade the city from enforcing laws that would “prohibit homeless individuals from sitting, lying, or sleeping on public property” unless there is adequate shelter available, the city continues deadly raids on individuals and encampments, blaming the homeless for San Francisco’s decline. This – instead of guaranteeing housing for all as a human right – scapegoats and blames those who suffer most from the ills the economy creates. Housing, support, real solutions, and real justice, not jail, for all people now!
San Francisco poet and organizer Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board, and a founding member of such organizations as the San Francisco Union of the Homeless, Homes Not Jails and 'First they came for the homeless’. Known for her poetry about the streets, her latest collections are Winter Rose, Sign and Holy Eel.
