SAN FRANCISCO. San Francisco’s Tenderloin is an area of about 25 blocks flanked by Union Square and Civic Center Areas. To the south it flows into Market St, the city’s main thoroughfare. The Tenderloin is centrally and conspicuously located.
A recent People’s Tribune visit to the Tenderloin revealed the community to be a patchwork of smaller communities, with blocks of varying scenes. We did not tour the neighborhood, but confined ourselves to the much maligned blocks where the poorest of the poor congregate. The COVID 19 pandemic, lockdown, shuttering of businesses, and subsequent loss of employment, income and housing put thousands of San Franciscans out on the street, such being reflected nationally as well as globally.
We did not find many sidewalk tents, but we did find some blocks lined with mostly apparently unhoused men, and a few women. Some just hung out and socialized, sitting in portable chairs, some sitting directly on the sidewalk, backs propped against the building. In some areas not one tree, not one blade of grass was evident.
And always there was the flow of sidewalk traffic, various and sundry everyday people going about their daily lives. There was the blare of loud music varying block to block, blasting hip-hop, or on another block Earth Wind and Fire. There were no portapotties, the most basic accommodations dehumanizingly denied, resulting in a urine-soaked sidewalk area.
Yet, in the midst of the blatantly visible decline of Western civilization, semblances of normalcy struggled to be. The glass door to her small shop completely shattered yet somehow intact, the unscathed neon sign thereon proclaims “OPEN.” A determined woman inside carried on as usual, calling to mind the New Orleans “Beale St Blues” song, “You’ll find that business never closes till somebody gets killed.”
Two men seated on crates played chess. A few Asian women conducted sidewalk sales — children’s clothing neatly folded and displayed on a tablecloth on the sidewalk, along with miscellaneous household items. And there were men offering musical CDs, odds and ends, miscellaneous tools and whatever; so this was the Tenderloin pop-up flea market and not the stolen goods “fencing” broadcast in the press.
A Cambodian woman in native dress was making kebobs. Her maroon, long sarong-like dress left one shoulder and one arm bare. She had a portable charcoal grill set up on a card table on the sidewalk, near the curb. She gave us a foot-long kebob packed with goodies, and said she sometimes gives food away because not everyone could afford her more than reasonable prices. Opposite her in a wheelchair her husband kept watch. He said she did catering in order to make the rent, which has been rising.
And to be sure, there were places where the so-called and much criticized “open air drug use” was visible — glass pipes and telltale little foil packets of fentanyl or meth. They should perhaps do drugs in the privacy of homes they do not have? It was mid-afternoon and some were getting a jump start on Happy Hour. Malt liquor was in evidence as were short shot mini-bottles of rum or other libations –alcohol and drugs being coping mechanisms for those who’d come to realize that they’d been discarded, that there was no employment, no housing, that there was no use for them. Having lost their purpose in life, they could see no future — hopes and dreams vanished in the glaring reality of the challenges of daily survival, sitting in limbo — refugees in their own country.
This March 5 San Franciscans will vote on Mayor London Breed’s Proposition F, which would mandate drug screening for the county’s 5,000 plus single adults who receive welfare, in order to detect a substance use disorder. If so determined by a “professional evaluator”, the recipient would be required to receive treatment or lose their cash assistance. “Treatment”, a nebulous term, often translates to involuntary detention and forced drugging in a locked psychiatric setting, substituting a prescribed psychiatric drug for the person’s illicit drug of choice. Neuroleptic (anti-psychotic) and antidepressant drugs have been widely prescribed by psychiatrists in the U.S. for decades and certainly currently. They are major tranquilizers and host a wide range of serious physical and mental side effects, including liver failure, hostile behavior, homicide and suicide. Screening for a substance abuse disorder would be done by the SF Human Services Agency. However, it is widely acknowledged that there is an acute shortage of beds to treat the drug or alcohol addict.
It’s been pointed out that if those with a substance use disorder lose their meager income, they’ll likely turn to crimes of survival — shoplifting, drug dealing, prostitution. Coincidentally, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, to be voted on in November, would turn a third conviction for retail theft into a felony, regardless of the amount stolen, which would include shoplifting, punishable by prison time — housing for the homeless felon.
Not to worry — the errant criminal can be rehabilitated. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s planned transformation of San Quentin State Prison into San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, ostensibly for the prisoners incarcerated there, could expand to include the growing numbers of criminalized homeless. They could learn new skills while employed as prison labor — a booming, highly lucrative national industry — and have a room in the new campus-like setting. As California’s prison inmate population shrinks, due to early release of non-violent and drug offenders, other prisons might step up to provide some of the needed 8,000 mental health and addiction treatment beds in renovated prisons, in lieu of building new facilities.
How to pay for this? Funding for the $360 million plan would come out of Gov. Newsom’s $6.38 billion ballot measure, Proposition 1, to be voted on in the March 5 primary election. The ballot would saddle taxpayers with 30 years of debt, promising to remove 181,000 unhoused Californians off the streets, two-thirds of whom are estimated to have a mental health disorder.
San Franciscans are urged to:
Vote No on Proposition 1
Vote No on Mayor Breed’s Proposition E, which would empower police to use drones, and to access video surveillance footage from private residents’ doorway cameras.
Vote NO on Breed’s Proposition F, requiring drug screening for welfare recipients, plus chemically lobotomizing psychiatric drug treatment for those who fail their drug tests, resulting in the loss of their very basic assistance income, in order to hold them, in her words, “accountable” to her for the paltry $200 or $300 a month they might receive when she herself made $357,000 in 2022. Surely it is the mayor who needs to be held accountable to humanely provide relief, not take it away from her suffering, displaced constituents – thousands of unhoused San Franciscans blamed not only for the lockdown and their own consequent homelessness, but also for the drug crisis, and the vacant downtown’s inability to economically bounce back from a pandemic the homeless did not cause and because of which are its most visible victims.
Politically-driven Mayor Breed should get a clue: If she would please the billionaire donors to her reelection campaign and deliver on her promise to get the unsightly unhoused off the streets of the Tenderloin and downtown, plus the thousands camped out all over SF, logically it is housing that would accomplish that, not punishment for the terrible illness of drug addiction.
Gloria A Lightheart was herself homeless for over seven years. Now living in subsidized housing, she continues to fight for the rights of the houseless.
