San Francisco homeless sweep was cheered on by the right. It was also illegal
San Francisco homeless sweep was cheered on by the right. It was also illegal
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd.
Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing had a 2022-2023 budget of $672 million dollars. This does not include EMT and police services. It's just what they earmark for homelessness.
In 2022, there were 7,754 unhoused people in San Francisco.
That's roughly $86,000 per person they spend on getting them housing, and still failing at it. The average rent for an apartment in SF is $3500 a month, or $42,000 per year. They're spending twice as much as they would if they just got apartments for people.
87Why do the right cheer as if it's a permanent solution? They'll be back as soon as the important people are gone. To say the problem is "fixed overnight" is like saying "Look Mom, I cleaned my room!" after you just finished sweeping everything underneath the bed and hiding it with the covers.
I do hope they fix the problem, but I don't know what else they can try other than just building houses and giving them the keys. That would probably be less expensive in the long run, but taxpayers evidently feel better paying for homelessness programs in perpetuity rather than giving people free shit one time.
40Were they moved into sanctuary districts? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District
DS9 just seems to get more and more relevant with age. Sad we haven’t done any better than projected by the show.
32I just do not understand why we are not addressing homelessness in more productive ways. We know it can be better managed as some countries have figured it out. Really crazy that we are not all on board with just doing the right thing and having a win win for all. We choose to suffer and we choose to sweep our suffering under the rug when guests come over.
23An extrapolation to say the government could clean up the city over night of homelessness because they were able to relocate a portion a few neighborhoods for an event.
22Illegal eviction and illegal failure to preserve tenant possessions. California let them move in and remain, now they must follow their own rules protecting squatters.
They will absolutely be sued for this.
It’s getting there but we’re still pretty far from critical mass. Need 10x more people to truly show the world how far US has slipped in favor of the 0.01%.
21Of course conservatives would cheer the continued marginalization and traumatization of society's most vulnerable. They touch themselves to the cruelty.
21also no one on the left went live on any national tv broadcast to denounce it either
20American liberals are only progressive until it fucks with their money.
16I read the article, there doesn't seem to be any mention of where they went. The people vice interviewed seem to be playing coy and giving a bunch of carefully sanitized non-answers about what happened.
San Francisco just made 500 homeless people vanish?No, excuse me, big ol' homeless camps just happened to up and vanish with no police intervention just in time for APEC? Yeah, fucking right. Dollars to dimes that they bussed them to the central valley. I know you can do better than this, California, get your shit together.12I also noticed that after a recent sweep/camp cleanup of homeless encampments in Seattle, the local Sinclair station (KOMO) was quick to run footage of people (presumably to be representative of Seattle folk generally) basically gloating that AT LAST they did something
Yes, the right are going to do everything they can to give others the impression that everyone else also regards poor people to be vermin, to be purged... preferably violently. The purpose of this sort of language is always to condition its audience to accept, if not cheer for, violence.
11The city does seem to be in terminal decline, and the homeless encampments sure aren't helping.
But just pushing them around isn't helping.
7Permanently Deleted
5Old joke:
Politician 1: We should half the homeless people in our city!
Politician 2: Great idea! Do we cut them in half horizontally or vertically?5Getting ready for the Bell Riots
4Well at least they cleaned up the area, though it'll just be overrun next week when the international dignitaries leave and it all goes back to normal
3How come the US has such a massive homelessness problem while having pretty much the cheapest real estate in the world (relative to income)? People in other developed countries can't even dream about such low prices. The US government also has the world's biggest budget - just house people for free for fucks sake! It's literally pennies for the state.
P.S. Property to income ratio source - https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp
1I'm as liberal as the next guy, and i know this will definitely not be a popular opinion here, but honestly we need to stop giving homeless people a free pass and I'm fucking serious. A lot of these people do it only because they can get away with it. They need to know that what they are doing isn't OK. It's not the answer, there really isn't a single answer, but we also can't just keep enabling them. I say this as a person with a homeless meth addict sister, a brother in law who's been on drugs his whole life and is currently in section 8, and a sister in law who got her shit together after being a homeless addict. I also have family who have volunteered full time at shelters and food banks
Most of these homeless there are either addicts or severely mentally ill and need help. Of course I'm just referring to the addicts here, the mentally ill need help. Homeless families down on their luck aren't included here, they typically know where support is and are using it.
-1Let's put them on buses and send them to El Paso to be Greg FukButt's problem. If they're homeless, they're useless unless we use them as pawns in a political game anyway, so why not? A perfect pristine human city is made of unicorn farts and sunshine (and little statues of Jesus). There are no problematic, dirty, addicted or homeless people in God's vision for our world.
-14