Imagine that you find your home infested by cockroaches. You call an exterminator, and he tells you: “What you need to do is to put out big packets of sugar for the roaches.” 

“But roaches love sugar. How will that get rid of them?” 

“It won’t. But roaches are God’s creatures, and they need to eat, too.”

A typical cockroach scene

“But they’ve taken over my kitchen. They’re filthy, they leave droppings everywhere and they contaminate the food I’m supposed to eat.” 

“You must learn to have compassion for all of God’s creatures, and learn to get along with them.” 

“So you’re not going to get rid of them for me?”

“No.” 

“So what are you going to do?”

“Help you to accept that they have a right to be a part of your community.” 

Any pest control company that operated like this would soon be out of business.

Yet, in San Francisco, successive mayors and members of the Board of Supervisors operate in exactly that manner toward succeeding waves of drug addicts, drunks, mentally ill and outright bums.

Who can otherwise be classified as DDMBs.

And those officials remain in office for years.  

Huge areas of the city are covered in feces, urine, trash and used hypodermic needles. Hospitals overflow with patients that have fallen ill due to the contamination.

Typical “homeless” campsite

In February, 2018, NBC News surveyed 153 blocks of the city—an area more than 20 miles. That area includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and the cable car turnaround. It’s bordered by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, Post Street and Grant Avenue. And it’s also home to City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.

Reporters found trash littered across every block. Forty-one blocks were covered with needles and 96 blocks were  contaminated with piles of human feces.

Most of the trash found consisted of heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk—including 100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown. If you step on one of these needles, you can get HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B or a variety of other viral diseases. 

In 2015, Public Works cleanup crews picked up more than 679 tons of trash from homeless tent camps—and collected more than 100,000 used syringes from the camps.

But you don’t have to actually get stuck by a needle to become a victim. Once fecal matter dries, it can become airborne and release deadly viruses, such as the rotavirus.

“If you happen to inhale that, it can also go into your intestine,” says Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. The results can prove fatal, especially in children.

And cleaning up the messes of DDMBs is no easy task. In a 2018 news story on NBC’s San Francisco affiliate, KNTV, Mohammed Nuru, the Director of the Public Works Department, said: “Yes, we can clean, and then go back a few hours later, and it looks as if it was never cleaned. So is that how you want to spend your money?”

A single pile of human waste takes at least 30 minutes for one of his staffers to clean up. “The steamer has to come. He has to park the steamer. He’s got to come out with his steamer, disinfect, steam clean, roll up and go.”

Another danger posed by DDMBs: Hundreds—if not  thousands—of them are heroin addicts. Such people will commit virtually any crime to support their habit. And their crimes of choice are burglary and robbery.

Thus, pouring large numbers of them into San Francisco neighborhoods via “Navigation Centers”—essentially holding pens for DDMBs—guarantees that countless decent citizens will become targets for desperate criminals.

Navigation Centers boast that they ban drug-abuse or drug-dealing on their own premises. But they allow DDMBs to come and go at will. Which means they are free to engage in drug-abuse and/or drug-dealing in the neighborhoods where these centers exist.

In 2016, San Francisco spent $275 million on homelessness—up from $241 million in 2015. Four years later, City Hall is preparing to spend $300 million to find housing for DDMBs.

San Francisco’s political elite see this blight as well as everyone else. They can’t avoid seeing it, since the city covers 47 square miles. 

San Francisco City Hall

Cabe6403 at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

One of those who sees the disgrace up-front is Supervisor Hillary Ronen: “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable We’re losing tourists. We’re losing conventions in San Francisco.” 

Yet what does she propose as the solution? “We need more temporary beds for street homelessness.” 

This is on a par with a “pest control expert” recommending: “We need more sugar to clear up our roach problem.”

The latest fad remedy: “Navigation Centers.” These will supposedly warehouse DDMBs temporarily until they can be “navigated” to permanent housing.

But housing is in short supply in San Francisco, and there is no telling how long how many of these drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally disabled and bums will stay in them. Or what harm they will wreak on the neighborhoods warehousing them.

Meanwhile, other—and effective—remedies are available.

In San Francisco, rents are so high that most of the city’s firefighters, police officers and school teachers can’t afford to live there.

Yet the Mayor and Board of Supervisors are spending $300 million a year to ensure that drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill and outright bums can do so.

Yes, welcome to San Francisco—home of cable cars, Ghirardelli Square and the Golden Gate Bridge.

And, oh, yes—and thousands of stinking, disease-ridden, lice/bedbug-infested, drug-addicted, alcohol-soaked, often psychotic men and women whom city officials politely refer to as “the homeless.”

Thanks to its mild climate and social programs that dole out cash payments to virtually anyone with no residency requirement, San Francisco is often considered the homeless capital of the United States.

Current estimates peg the homeless population of San Francisco at about 7,500. And it hasn’t changed much during the last 10 years.

In 2019, a survey found that an estimated 2,831 members of this population were sheltered. Another 5,180 were unsheltered. This made for a total of 8,011.

The vast majority of them fall into four groups:

• Drug-abusers
• Drunks
• Mentally ill
• Bums.

Or, to put it more discretely: DDMBs.

Many DDMBs refuse to enter the city’s available shelters. Some claim these places are dangerous—understandably so, since they’re peopled with drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill and outright bums.

But another reason why many of these shelters go unused is: They don’t allow their guests to drink up or drug up. 

The city spends about $300 million each year on DDMBs. Dividing that amount by 8,011 provides the figure of $37,448 per DDMB.

Yet mere statistics don’t capture the true intensity of the problem. To do that, you must confront its realities at the street level.

One of those realities can be seen every Sunday, when many stores on Market Street close for lack of workday traffic. Stroll along the street and you’ll find it crowded with passed-out drunks/druggies, ranting psychotics and aggressive panhandlers.

Another such reality was Suzie Wong, who went by the name Ling Ling.  A resident of the Nob Hill District, Wong daily gave residents and tourists a sight to remember her by.

She alighted from the 27 Bryant bus from the Mission and halted at the nearby bus stop. Then she dropped her drawers to leave a yellow or brown deposit on the sidewalk. Finally, she crossed the street, and caught the 1 California bus for Chinatown.

When she didn’t relieve herself on Nob Hill, she often did so on Stockton Street in Chinatown. Then she headed to her usual spot to panhandle.

Children and pets often stepped in her feces. So did adults, who were preoccupied with their cell phones. 

Parents vainly tried to shield their kids from the disgusting sight. Residents lodged scores of complaints about Wong’s repeated defecations.  

The Department of Public Works sent crews to clean up her messes countless times. Police repeatedly scooped up Wong for a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold at San Francisco General Hospital. 

But doctors usually released her before the cops even get back to the station.

Under a 5150 designation, people can be held at the hospital for up to 72 hours to determine:

• Are they gravely disabled?
• Are they mentally ill?
• If they are mentally ill, do they pose a danger to themselves or others? 

But authorities repeatedly determined that Wong didn’t fit any of these criteria. The reasons:

• She had a mental health care worker at a North Beach clinic.
• She had arranged housing and food services throughout the city.
• She could use public transit. 

Chalk up another win for the DDMBs.

And this despicable behavior is repeated countless times by other DDMBs throughout the city.

San Francisco officials have effectively washed their hands (if not the streets) of the problem. If local residents must put up with repeated violations of the most basic sanitation laws, that’s their tough luck.

What matters to the Mayor and Board of Supervisors is this: The “rights” of those whose filth poses an immediate threat to public health take precedence over those of tax-paying, law-abiding San Franciscans.

During the Mayorship of Willie Brown (1996 – 2004), Hizzonor proposed what he thought was a brilliant way for residents to “contribute” to street people. Those who were somehow certified as “homeless” would be issued special electronic “cash cards.”

When someone wanted to make a “donation,” s/he would swipe a credit card against the one owned by the street bum, for whatever amount s/he wanted to donate.

But before the program started, someone at City Hall realized a blunt truth: Residents—especially women—weren’t likely to whip out their credit cards in front of a ranting, foul-smelling, probably disease-ridden street bum. 

San Francisco residents can be fined $25 to $1,000 for feeding pigeons—but not for giving money to street bums.

In 2010, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed the “No Sit/No Lie” ordinance, which “makes it unlawful, with certain exceptions, to sit or lie on a public sidewalk, or on an object placed on a public sidewalk, between 7AM and 11PM.”

It also prohibits sleeping in public parks at night and building encampments.

And is it enforced?  Not in DDMB-loving San Francisco. 

So much for the will of tax-paying voters.