Symptom, Not Cause
Lost in all the justifiable scorn and outrage over the letter being satirized very effectively here by Jim Gavin is the fact that San Francisco really does have a serious homelessness problem. That problem is the inclination of so many of the City’s residents to just walk on by or to seem to think of the homelessness confronting them every day as some sort of act of God — or to treat it all as the fault of people like “Justin”. (Or even, god help me, as some sort of opportunity for showy ineffectual self-aggrandizing “sharing”).
I know from personal experience that many visitors to the City see the homeless begging or sleeping rough on (say) the Embarcadero and think “What a shit place! They can’t even look after their own…” (a verbatim exclamation from an Australian friend not long ago). And they’re right — all those homeless people rifling through garbage cans or sprawled across the sidewalk or shitting in a bus shelter or on public benches (I see the latter maybe once a month on my daily walk to work along the Embarcadero) — they’re not imaginary or inevitable, they’re the product of a couple of decades of decisions by the City’s residents, coupled (admittedly) with forces much larger than the City.
It’s way too convenient to blame the Justins of this world, but they’re just bogeymen and scapegoats for something that’s been going on much longer than the thrusting sense of entitlement that techies like him supposedly represent. In reality it’s the good liberal middle-class burghers who’ve lived here a couple of decades and who’ve spent those decades voting for and encouraging things like overpriced food trucks, chi chi hipster cafes selling artisanal goat cheese and almond lattes, tweely-named craft beers, and farmers markets that cater mostly to the well-off. “Civic improvement” so often used to mean social cleansing by stealth; so can, in their own way, things like weirdo street fairs and vegan restaurants.
Smug, strident self righteousness has been a potent currency in the City for decades, and perhaps some sort of humble thoughtfulness (rather than self-absorption) about the issue might be better than blaming the (unwitting) symptom. It’s always easier to (say) adopt Westernized yoga as a lifestyle accessory than it is to agitate effectively for decent health care for everyone; it’s always easier to put that Bernie sticker on your second Prius than it is to wonder why that guy passed-out on the Muni platform is really there (with that second Prius you’re not on Muni anyway, I guess); it’s much easier to dress up in Spandex clown suits and cycle self-righteously in middle-aged posses on expensive bikes through the City on weekends than it is to constructively engage with a complex, deep-rooted problem; and it’s always easier to admire the new street mural outside the latest Blue Bottle or Philz than it is to effectively help the homeless who have to sleep in tents or doorways around it.
When you neglect the fundamentals in favor of the sorts of things that can only be afforded by the nice older upper-middle-classes (most of whom bought early and are quite comfortable), well, your city not only becomes affordable only by those nice older upper middle-class people, it (inevitably) attracts the sort of people like “Justin”. What were you thinking? That’s right, you weren’t thinking, at least not of anyone but yourselves. Face it: “Justin” is a symptom of the past few decades in much the same way that the homelessness is.
C’est la vie, I say (or perhaps “just desserts” would be more appropriate). I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.
(Not picking on Jim here — his article was a well-written piece that everyone should read…).
