San Francisco’s current contretemps regarding homeless camps in Golden Gate Park is exposing important shortcomings in the city’s effort to eliminate chronic homelessness.
The basic problem is that municipal officials have never really come to terms with the magnitude and complexity of the overall problem.
The Golden Gate Park fiasco, which has produced additional stress and suffering for the homeless people immediately involved, can be used to illustrate the point.
The current upsurge of critical municipal attention was focused on the park’s numerous, chaotic encampments by a series of irate articles printed this August in the normally somnolent San Francisco Chronicle.
The somewhat sensational articles, which were characterized by a tone of astonished indignation, decried the squalid conditions in the chaotic camps. The prominently featured articles devoted particular attention to the size of the camps, their rumpled, residents and the haphazard circumstances of their lives.
The articles also provided, long, detailed commentary on the alleged dangers posed by the camps by highlighting the presence of discarded hypodermic needles, and other refuse dangerous to unwary park visitors.
Unsurprisingly, the articles generated a minor firestorm of critical commentary by residents and municipal officials.
The majority of the respondents expressed disgust with conditions in the park, and many called for the use of harsh measures intended to make life in San Francisco so miserable for homeless people that they will slink from town in search of less hostile places of refuge.
The articles also generated a flood of letters to the Chronicle’s editorial pages. The majority of those who chose to provide their opinions on the matter via this particular bully pulpit were hostile to homeless people in general, and those residing in the park in particular.
Few of the letter writers acknowledged the logic and anguish expressed by the homeless man who plaintively asked the following: What do they expect us to do, float in the air?”
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