Neighborhood Streets Made Impassible Due to Homeless Tents, Now the Residents Are Fighting Back
Some San Francisco residents are fed up with their city’s handling of the homeless population amid California’s coronavirus lockdown, and have filed a lawsuit to force the city to take action.
While San Francisco is offering hotel rooms to many homeless citizens and even supplying some of them with drugs, alcohol and tobacco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, others are now living on the streets in greater numbers because shelters are limiting their capacity.
The result is a near 300 percent increase in people living on the streets in tents in one community amid the coronavirus pandemic, which is blocking sidewalks and traffic.
This is by design, according to KRON, which reported city officials have opened up numerous sites throughout San Francisco where the homeless can live on the streets in greater numbers.
Since the homeless cannot properly social distance inside crowded shelters, the city has decided that those unable to get rooms at hotels are better off living in tent communities.
“Plans to move more of the city’s 8,000 homeless people are ongoing but encampments continue to grow throughout San Francisco,” the TV station reported.
But residents in the city’s Tenderloin district are officially fed up with an abundance of human waste and used hypodermic needles littering the streets of their community, according to Fox News.
The University of California Hastings College of Law filed a federal lawsuit last week on behalf of the neighborhood, which demands that the city’s leaders do something other than use it for a homeless encampment.
“We are suing because our neighborhood has become a pandemic containment zone,” Hastings College Chancellor David Faigman told CNN. “The city has basically cordoned off our area. Tents are blocking the streets. Tents are blocking doorways. There are needles in the streets. There’s open-air drug dealing.”
The Tenderloin district was already a hot spot for homeless in the city, and officials were reported to be working to solve the accompanying problems before the current health crisis, according to KGO.
But, with a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of homeless tents in the neighborhood since January — there are roughly 400 tents currently crowding the neighborhood’s streets, according to The Associated Press — and with no coronavirus screening being conducted on the homeless, Faigman said people in his neighborhood now fear the “virus is raging in the neighborhood.”
“There is no other neighborhood in San Francisco that would tolerate that, and they would stand up and be counted. The Tenderloin needs to stand up and be counted,” he said.
Faigman called for the federal government to get involved in order to “protect the people of San Francisco” from the encampments.
But by calling for the involvement of the federal government, San Franciscans such as Faigman are essentially admitting that the city needs to be protected from itself.
The Bay Area, which is the epicenter for California’s far-left ideas and policies, has essentially now created a second health crisis, which is the result of years of policies that do not work for taxpaying citizens.
The city of San Francisco and the state of California itself each deserve a share of the blame for why so many people are living on the streets to begin with.
Some attribute the homeless crisis in San Francisco to a housing crisis brought on by the tech billionaires who have driven up housing prices.
Others point the finger directly at lawmakers, which is probably where it belongs.
Proposition 47, which was passed by California voters in 2014 and was aimed at reducing sentences for some crimes by reclassifying them as misdemeanors, has heavily contributed to the urban decay in the state.
The result of Proposition 47 is that people who would have otherwise faced incarceration for some drug, property or other crimes are now roaming around California in what is essentially a consequence-free environment.
Ronald Lawrence, the president of the California Police Chiefs Association, blames the well-intentioned Proposition 47 for the homelessness crisis in the state.
“When you’re in the trenches, you know this is not a housing crisis, but a drug addiction and mental illness crisis. Prop. 47 is a dismal failure and an inhumane way to deal with drug addiction and homelessness. Before it went into effect, we had mechanisms and means to get people the help they needed,” Lawrence told the California Globe in February.
“[Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown] had a choice. He could have built more prisons, but instead he reduced the population by releasing or pushing inmates to local county jails, which are not designed to house someone past a year and prevents law enforcement from taking low-level offenders in,” Lawrence added.
During the coronavirus pandemic, California has flooded its communities with even more potentially dangerous people by releasing inmates to stop the spread of the coronavirus in jails.
A far-left solution to the health crisis has exacerbated an already tough situation for San Francisco’s residents, who also share some blame.
The people of San Francisco, and indeed all of California, continue to elect Democrats who are turning their communities into literal wastelands.
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