To capture the true intensity of the “homeless” problem in San Francisco, you must confront its realities at the street level.  Imagine:

• You’re elderly, and walking with a cane—and must often try to negotiate your way around big tents that take up most of a sidewalk.
• You’re riding in a wheelchair along a sidewalk until you come to a large mattress lying directly in your path, with a potentially psychotic “homeless” man lying upon it. 
• You find a street teeming with rats—eating the food scraps left by “homeless” people.
• You board a local bus and are forced to sit near a man stinking of feces and/or urine. Naturally, the driver doesn’t put him off—giving you the choice of surviving the stench or getting off to catch another bus.
• You walk into an underground Municipal Railway bus station—and find it littered with derelicts passed out or shooting up heroin in plain sight. Naturally, they don’t worry about picking up their used hypodermic needles. They leave those out for others to step on or pick up at their own risk.

• You’re standing at a bus stop or eating in a restaurant—when a large, filthy, possibly disease-carrying man or woman demands a “handout” from you.
• You can’t use the elevator at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station because “homeless” derelicts have ruined its mechanism with urine and feces.

In 2010, San Francisco voters 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.” 

But walk down almost any street in the downtown part of the city and you’ll find sidewalks crowded with stinking, disease-ridden, lice/bedbug-infested, drug-addicted, alcohol-soaked, often psychotic men and women whom city officials politely refer to as “the homeless.” 

Among the trappings that go with this population:

• Tents
• Mattresses
• Piles of belongings
• Stolen shopping cards
• Trash
• Half-eaten food
• Empty cans/bottles of alcohol
• Feces
• Hypodermic needles

What you’ll almost never see: Police actually enforcing the “No Sit/No Lie” ordinance.

So much for the will of the voters.

San Francisco officials have effectively washed their hands 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 and behavior pose an immediate threat to public health and safety take precedence over those of tax-paying, law-abiding San Franciscans.

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

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. 

It’s long past time for San Francisco—and other cities—to stop catering to the druggies, alcoholics, mental cases and bums who prey on the guilt or fear of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. 

The same laws that protect citizens against patients with highly communicable diseases like typhoid and cholera should be vigorously applied to those whose filthy habits threaten similar public contagion.

Among such reforms:

• The city should launch a “Please Do Not Feed the Bums” publicity campaign—as it has against feeding pigeons. And it should be backed up with stiff fines for those caught doing so.  
• Those living on the street should be given a choice: Go to a local shelter or face arrest and the immediate confiscation of their possessions.
• Bus drivers should have the right to refuse passengers who stink of urine/feces, as they present a potential health-hazard to others.
• The owners of restaurants should likewise be allowed to refuse service on the same basis.
• Those applying for welfare benefits should be required to provide proof of residence. Too many people come to San Francisco because, upon arrival, they can immediately apply for such benefits.
• The city should set up a special unit to deal entirely with removing “street people” and their possessions from city sidewalks. This could be a division of the Sanitation Department, since its personnel are used to removing filth and debris of all types. 

San Francisco officials need to:

• Forcefully tell alcoholics and drug addicts: “Your anti-social behavior is not welcome here. Take your self-destructive lifestyles elsewhere.  We won’t subsidize them.”
• Take the mentally unstable off the street and place them in institutions where their needs can be met. 
• Tell those who are just plain bums: Don’t expect us to support you.

Only then will San Francisco rightly reclaim its former glory as “the city by the Bay.”

Imagine that, late one night, you wake up and decide to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. You turn on the light—and suddenly find a virtual army of cockroaches hurriedly scurrying across the floor.  

In the morning, you call an exterminator, and a “pest control specialist” soon knocks at your door. 

“What you need to do,” he says, “is to put out big packets of sugar for the roaches.” 

“Wait a minute—don’t roaches love sugar?  How is this going to make them go away?” 

“It won’t.”  

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is that 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 if I hire you, 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.” 

If a pest control company actually operated like that, how long would they be in business? 

Not long. 

Yet, in San Francisco, successive mayors and members of the Board of Supervisors operate in exactly that manner toward succeeding waves of human pestilence. And they remain in office for years.  

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

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. 

A typical San Francisco scene

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. 

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.

As the news unit filmed a typical day’s activity in San Francisco, a group of preschool students, enjoying a field trip, walked to City Hall.  

Responding to a reporter’s question, Adelita Orellana said: “We see poop, we see pee, we see needles, and we see trash.

“Sometimes they ask what is it, and that’s a conversation that’s a little difficult to have with a two-year old, but we just let them know that those things are full of germs, that they are dangerous, and they should never be touched.” 

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.” 

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.

According to a 2016 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, there are about 13,000 “homeless” people in San Francisco. Of these, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 refuse shelter.

In 2016, San Francisco spent $275 million on homelessness—up from $241 million 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.  

In 2016, San Francisco residents made 22,608 complaints about encampments—a five-fold increase from 2015.

City officials euphemistically call this population “the homeless.”  That’s because they don’t want to use words that accurately describe those who comprise the overwhelming majority of this population:

• Druggies
• Drunks
• Mentals
• Bums.

Or, as even many police, social workers and paramedics who wrestle with this population privately refer to them: DDMBs.

Yet the mere citing of statistics—how many “homeless,” how much money is spent on how many people, how much filth they produce—doesn’t capture the true intensity of the problem.

To do that, you must confront its realities at the street level.  Which is what we’ll do in Part Two of this series.