San Francisco — a beautiful red bridge amidst a stunning natural back drop. Organic, local, and seasonal foodie culture pioneer. Environmentally-friendly. LGBTQ-friendly. Progressive. Innovative.
The global public image of San Francisco is overtly positive, but I never understood how people never talk about the prevalence of human excrement on the sidewalk and all the smells to be associated with it. No one talks about how uneasy it feels to walk down the streets of the Tenderloin for fear of being grabbed or barked at by someone who is mentally ill and need of help. The common sight of a small pile of personal items unattended in the street fills me with dread about the potential fate of whoever didn’t return for their few possessions.
A global example of an innovation hub, San Francisco is also an example of how not to run a city. It’s an urban planning disaster. Instead, the media, the protestors, and the city are pointing fingers at the tech workers and the source of the economic growth and development in the city.
6, 436 homeless individuals in San Francisco.
That’s a number reached by a biannual homeless count by the Human Services Agency. With its temperate weather and high tolerance, it’s no wonder that San Francisco has long been an intentional destination for homeless from around the country, many of whom have been dealt an unfair hand in life.
In San Francisco and the Storm of Progress, a recent Medium post, Katharine Blake McFarland did well to expose how profound the problem is, and how it affects the experience of the city.
The popular sentiment is to blame the problem on rising rents and influx on tech workers, but neither these conditions nor homelessness is new to the city. Homelessness has been a major issue in San Francisco since the 80s; it was just as popular in the 80s, and the 90s, and the 00s as it is now to blame new workers moving to the city and causing rents to rise.
McFarland’s overarching message is that seeing the homeless as an ‘other’ is unproductive and cruel — a point well worth making. But in so doing, she instead demonizes the most recent round of tech workers, symbolized now by the large white buses shuttling Silicon Valley commuters to and from the city.
Protestors consistently portray these buses as emblems of the Silicon Valley rich who are invading their fare city. If you really want to make this a class warfare situation, it’s important to make the distinction between the majority of the employees of the tech sector from the CEOs and start up founders who have sold their companies for billions of dollars. Lets be clear, millionaires in SF, despite their recent growth, still only make up 2% of the population, and I’d be surprised if they were taking the shuttle to work.
The majority of the men and women sitting on the Google/Facebook/LinkedIn buses are millennial. The same millennial who have been saddled with an average of $26,600 in debt, nearly three times the average debt of the generation before them; who were told that despite a 538% increase in tuition, college was a worthy investment, but then found their college degrees devalued and insufficient to get a job; who have bore the brunt of the recession and are still facing the highest levels of unemployment. They are the Boomerang Generation, who had to move back in with their parents, because with a lack of employment prospects, lower salaries, and high levels of debt, they couldn’t afford to live on their own.
They have overcome their fair share of hardships and have followed the jobs to the West Coast. If you’re currently on the job market (which I am), every opportunity can feel like it points to San Francisco. For the pleasure of having a job, they get to be harangued by last decade’s gentrifier, on top of paying more than half of their salaries to live in exorbitantly over-priced housing, and similarly struggling with the rising costs of living.
The people sitting on the bus are not innately better than the people sleeping on the street, and I’m willing to bet it’s a small percentage of them that think they are. Protestors and the media grab hold of the easy bait, the statements of a vocal minority who say offensive and incendiary things. It’s an easy PR tactic, but it’s not productive (assuming the goal is to fix the housing problem). This rhetoric keeps the issue in the construct of class warfare, of rich against the poor, when the players are the middle-class and the poor.
It’s not the fault of the 20-something that moved to San Francisco to work a sales job at Facebook that eviction rates have risen 40% since 2010. It’s time to shift the conversation away from the white buses, and toward the public policy failures that these numbers indicate.
Homelessness is not unique to San Francisco, but the lack of solutions is. In New York, despite having a population that is 10 times larger than San Francisco’s, the rate of homelessness is only 8 times larger. But it’s not the number of homeless that’s growing in San Francisco, it’s the number of street homeless — that is homeless individuals who have no access to shelters.
Here’s a more surprising number. In New York, there are 3,180 street homeless. In San Francisco that number is 3,401. With only a 10th of the population, SF has more street homeless in absolute terms than New York.
More than half of the homeless population suffer from mental illness, in large part because San Francisco won’t implement Laura’s Law and hasn’t provided a sufficient alternative. More importantly, there’s no recourse for social services to provide assistance for these individuals, who may not have the family or personal connection to make the decision and are not in an appropriate state of mind to make an informed decision.
Local government is not actively making inroads to solving these issues. When it comes to the housing shortage, a major cause of climbing rents, San Francisco is enacting policies that prevent private builders from making improvements to meet the demand. “San Francisco was down-zoned (that is, the density of housing or permitted expansion of construction was reduced) to protect the “character” that people loved. It created the most byzantine planning process of any major city in the country.” The same people who supported this policy are blaming the tech industry for the problems it’s causing.
Why isn’t the government setting in place policies to slow down the drastic rise in rents across the city to alleviate the pressure on working and middle classes? Why isn’t San Francisco putting in place better public transportation so that employees don’t have to reply on private buses to get to work?
In a city that is known for its progressive and proactive government, why are these issues allowed to go unaddressed? Why isn’t city government being held accountable?
The truth is, San Francisco, that the tech industry you’re so keen to demonize is growing your economy and creating more jobs. Some of the best and the brightest from around the world are migrating from global metropolises like London, New York City, Tokyo, and Paris, to live in San Francisco because of the tech industry. These workers are holding the city to a higher standard because they are used to better. Rather than blame them for San Francisco changing and excoriate them for being critical, it’s time to demand the city government provide the higher standard that San Francisco deserves.
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