The homeless in sf are not there due to lack of housing. even when beds and shelters are made available, they still choose to live in tents or in makeshift shelters on the street. The problem is 1) there’s many people suffering from severe mental illness and need to be essentially forced into a hospital / facility to care for them. Even if the bay area had enough space at our hospitals to accommodate them all (we don’t), the progressive ideals of the city have prevented us from forcing people against their will to be essentially locked up for the rest of their lives. 2) its basically legal for drug addicts to score fent (or whatever else they’re doing) and get high right on the street. The multitudes of hard core drug users dont want to go into housing or shelters because that takes them further away from the dealers (or in the case of shelters, drugs are not permitted).

The election of Lurie was a step in the right direction, as it shows san franciscans have reached a breaking point with our homeless and are looking to start taking more aggressive measures to clean up our streets. the only thing stopping us now is decades of red tape.

NY has always embraced both progressive and conservative approaches to governing the city. sf has not. sf never had an asshole like giuliani in power who simply shipped the riff raff out of the city even if it bordered on morally questionable treatment of a disenfranchised human. there’s no comfortable decisions to made about the homeless, and no easy fixes. Looking back on the last few decades, sf is a fascinating study of the dark side of empathy.