Some local business owners want the city to close U.N. Plaza, which is overrun with illegal activity, including vending.
I’ve been there. Let’s call it what it is. Step 1. This is full blown addiction. It’s unmanageable. It’s out of control. It’s causing immense harm. Everyone, from the hard assed cynic to the bleeding heart liberal is powerless. Now let’s be clear, I am not in favor of taking the city through the 12 Steps, and I have lots of problems with the system anyway. But it is how I got sober and at least part of the background for my reaction.
There are lots of possible causes: a massive explosion in the homeless population, the exit of high tech and the resulting economic downturn, the massive disparity in wealth, the lack of savvy leadership. But fuck it, in my recovery it wasn’t that I was lonely or poor or weird, although all that was also probably true. It was the drugs. No matter who is painting the picture or analyzing the problem, don’t lose track of the fact that it’s the fucking drugs.
But then I had a kind of revelation. How did I get sober? Just the steps weren’t enough. Not even close. I also had a vision of what my life could be. Maybe I’d hidden it away. Maybe I’d forgotten it. Maybe my cynical side didn’t believe it, but I knew I was living in the shadows. There was more to life than crystal meth.
San Francisco has had a vision. At least it used to. It was the gateway to the Gold Rush, the Golden Gate. It was Gold Mountain for the Cantonese whose indentured servitude was really just a new version of slavery prohibited after the Civil War. It was the Heart of Golden West, the coast where America built defenses to fight the Great War in the Pacific. It was the place where soldiers and sailors returning from the Guadalcanal and Corregidor disembarked and began to recreate their lives rather than going back to the empty prairies and plains between the coasts
San Francisco has also been known as The City on a Hill, Gay Mecca, Baghdad by the Bay though I could never really figure out why Baghdad, but that was Herb Caen and he came from Sacramento and he was just a newspaper hack so what the hell did he know anyway? It sounded cute. Jack Kerouac called it Frisco thus ever planting him as an outsider. It was a safe haven for the Beat Generation. Ginsberg read Howl in the Western Addition. It changed the face of American literature all the way to the Supreme Court when that meant something. It even helped us define what we can do with language. Mr. Justice [Holmes] said: “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”
Part of the vision of what was possible in San Francisco--if you don’t like it, then change it, and change yourselves in the process.
As a San Franciscan for most of my adult life, I know it as the place where the Stonewall Revolution met middle class gay life in a way that changed the political and social landscape forever as well as provided the testing ground for its cohesion during a horrific and tragic public health crisis. That required vision and leadership. Many, but one man in particular, Harvey Milk, rose to the occasion at great personal cost and the GLBTQ community never looked back. That took vision of what was possible against all odds.
The fight against HIV/AIDS was actually longer in terms of San Francisco history, and much more costly in terms of deaths and dollars. Because for more than a decade AIDS was a certain death sentence, it was also an existential crisis for so many friends and comrades. Very difficult terrain. But over time, with an enormous amount of self sacrifice by far too many people, including prodding an underfunded medical research community, there was a real breakthrough.
The problems are huge. The addictive properties of Fentanyl are 500 times more extreme than any other street drugs that have ever been available. The population affected is less educated, articulate and organized than the mostly gay men and women who fought AIDS or rallied for political clout.
The political leadership is simply not equal to the task. But London Breed isn’t the real problem is she? She may be totally corrupt and a complete idiot, but it’s too easy to lay the blame for a completely hopeless situation at her feet, or any feet other than my own. A lot of people are doing that. But she does seem to be adrift.
What has happened to San Francisco? 38,000 individuals in the Bay Area are homeless, an increase of 35 percent since 2019. San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants to carve out $692.6 million in homelessness spending next year to help meet the city's five-year plan to cut homelessness in half. That’s roughly 18,000 a year per person. But currently my sources tell me that a homeless person in San Francisco can receive up to $10,000 in benefits. This is no longer assistance but an incentive.
Someone said that circumstances have created the “perfect storm,” the flood of drugs and the increase in vulnerable populations would defy Wonder Woman. Difficult, yes. This person also mentioned that treatment “beds” are empty, in other words that there are opportunities for addicts seeking treatment to receive professional intervention, but no one wants to get sober. Perhaps this is true. But even after highlighting the problem in 2019, Breed just this month figured out that there might be an easily accessible database to direct case managers, addicts, to these empty “beds,” possible life saving treatments.
The existing nonprofits and substance abuse agencies are bloated, ineffectual and stretched too thin. I just counted 15 free treatment programs, 28 inpatient drug & alcohol rehab centers, 51 outpatient, plus 23 detox centers in the Bay Area, that’s more than 100 separate agencies listed online serving various populations. I appreciate the need for programs suited to an addict’s needs, but you’re not going to convince me that the duplicate administrative costs, already high, as well as multiple development departments chasing the same dollars to run their programs are not draining resources.
Businesses, homeowners and others with a stake in the outcome have been pushed beyond any reasonable limits. Market Street is now almost completely shuttered. San Francisco’s tourism business of more than 8 billion dollars is going to take a massive hit. Friends who still live in San Francisco tell me that they feel at risk whenever they venture outside.
Who is at fault and who has the power to do anything? The blame game is fun when we really haven’t got a clue about what to do, but really, does that do anything to even begin to alleviate the dire situation? No.
Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker said,“If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
I am confident that San Francisco can create a vision that will save its soul. The situation seems extreme, but not insurmountable. It seems to me that the missing piece is a vision of what is possible.
