Homeless by the bay

SAN FRANCISCO – Leaving one’s heart in this city is still possible, but no longer as easily as it once was. The city is still pretty, but also dirty and in some areas, doesn’t smell very good.

The city has a rather serious homeless problem and it is very visible. It is probably politically incorrect to call them bums, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind as you encounter them in some of the city’s busiest districts.

My daughter recently left her apartment in the city and moved to the suburbs near the airport after she just got tired of being harrassed in the streets. She was even punched in the arm as she jogged in her neighborhood.

Edward Liu, a Chinoy from Binondo who was my classmate in UP and now a lawyer holding office in San Francisco’s financial district, has this view: “Tale of two cities in Dot.com town… tech white urban gentrification in mid-Market Street… multi-million dollar condo units surrounded by urban blight.

“San Francisco is a tale of two cities… one for the techies, the preppies, the yuppies and young high-tech slickers… the unemployed, unemployables, street people, drug dealers, drug addicts, criminal recidivists on parole, mentally sick dumped on San Francisco’s mean downtown streets… tent city for the homeless… filth, street defecation, blight.

“Police officers now walk the street in this area in threesome… because they fear for their own safety. This is downtown dot.com country… an urban combat zone of homeless derelicts, vagrants, and urban predators.”

The thing is, the increased homelessness one sees comes even as many of the well-off dot com folks from Silicon Valley have moved in. Twitter received tax breaks to put up its head office in a broken down area some years ago. It was supposed to attract new developments. It didn’t work. A number of the homeless have camped nearby and the sidewalk smells of urine.

But the entry of the Silicon Valley millionaires have caused rents to escalate so that it is no longer possible for a typical middle class family to afford being there. The city has not been able to keep up with demand for affordable housing for many years now.

For thebolditalic.com, a website, the frustrating question persists: Why isn’t one of the richest, most liberal, most idealistic cities in the country?—?and the world?—?able to solve homelessness?

It has estimated that 7,500 residents are homeless—a number that has stayed stagnant for years. Of those, roughly 2,112 are chronically homeless, defined as someone who has experienced homelessness for a year or longer (or at least four times during the last three years). There’s a wait list of more than 1,000 people at any given time for temporary shelter in addition to a severe lack of options for permanent housing.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes a former city official saying, “The problem is terrible. I have never seen it this bad in my 30 years of working on this issue. I was just walking (in the Mission) and there was just tent after tent after tent,” she said.

“People were playing guitars, going to the bathroom in the streets, and there was this resigned sense of acceptance that this was their home. That this is just the way it is.”

It is the same problem in Silicon Valley. Fox News reports that Palo Alto lacks “not just low-income, affordable housing, but middle-income, working-class housing for teachers, firemen and long-time residents hoping to live anywhere near work.”

At least they have BART or the commuter train system that allows middle class workers to live further away. But the rise in property prices and housing rents is already covering such a wide area beyond the BART system. Rush hour commute times by car are rising and the folks here are not used to traffic crawl the way we are.

Back in the city, they are experimenting with micro houses as a new way of housing homeless people. These are really tiny homes — stackable modular housing units, typically with less than 200 square feet of living space.

The SF Chronicle reports that “modular stackable units, often called ‘Lego houses’ because they bolt together easily, have showers, beds and kitchens. Individually they resemble shipping containers, but once they’re bolted together with siding and utilities, they look like a regular building.”

But, The SF Chronicle reports, the idea didn’t gain traction. City planners said land was hard to find, and unions didn’t like the fact that some of the units are built in China.

Seeing homeless people in the streets is nothing new for us in the Third World. But here in the world’s biggest economy, it simply reveals social inequality at its worst.

And because the cold winds of winter have started to blow, it is tougher to be without a roof in this land of plenty than it is back home. But I am told that many refuse to go to organized homeless shelters which impose restrictions on alcohol and drug use. Still, others are just down on their luck.

Some of the solutions they are thinking of, like those micro homes, should be interesting for us to consider. Maybe Congress should mandate our land developers, particularly the big ones, to put up these easy to build homes at the site of present squatter colonies.

Right now the developers are obligated to build some low cost housing but they end up building far from the city center where the jobs are. On-site housing, right where they are living now ought to be the solution.

Our own housing problem is also getting worse every year. The funds available for responding to our housing backlog are also diminished by corruption at the NHA.

This is one problem where President Duterte can make a difference.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco