Anyone who has been keeping tabs on what’s going on in San Francisco in recent years knows that the city is facing a homelessness problem. In fact, much of California has a homelessness problem, with costly real estate keeping both home prices and rents high, and a generous welfare state not encouraging those homeless and out of work to find productive employment.
San Francisco’s homelessness problem is particularly acute because of the vast numbers of homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and/or substance abusers. These thousands of homeless also leave piles of feces all over the city, a problem that even spawned an app so that San Franciscans could report human waste and excrement.
Faced with thousands of homeless people who could potentially spread COVID-19, and a hotel industry ravaged by COVID and the fall in tourist travel, the city of San Francisco did what any other leftist government would do – it placed thousands of homeless people in hotel rooms around the city.
Numerous hotels around the city volunteered to house the homeless, presumably because they then would receive a payout from the city. And the results have been as spectacularly successful as you could imagine any San Francisco government initiative to be.
Reports have emerged that city officials have provided the substance-addicted homeless with alcohol, drugs, and methadone to keep them from going through withdrawal. The results have been parties, overdoses, and deaths, with hotel rooms mirroring the streets of San Francisco, littered with blood, feces, and drug paraphernalia.
The problem with many homeless isn’t that they’re down on their luck people who just need to be given a roof over their head to get back into the swing of things. It’s the fact that they’re people who make the wrong decisions no matter how many chances they’re given. Give them a hotel room and they’ll trash it. Give them a job and they won’t show up. Give them money and they’ll spend it on booze and drugs.
The only help such people can use is help in turning their lives around by making the right decisions, not the wrong ones. But as long as San Francisco refuses to acknowledge the problem and refuses to pass judgment on those bad decisions, the city itself will continue to make bad decisions and waste more and more taxpayer dollars on a homelessness problem it isn’t going to be able to fix.