Robert L. Terrell

San Francisco’s municipal leaders exude considerable pride when they assert that they have removed approximately 8,000 homeless people from the city’s streets during the past six years. Pride is also evident when they discuss the number of homeless people who have been substantially rehabilitated during their watch via municipal assistance.

Several methods were employed over the years to via their sustaind campaign to dramatically reduce the number of homeless people on the city’s streets, including the practice of providing free, one-way bus tickets for homeless people who agreed to be deported in this manner. Between 2004 and 2007, more than 2,500 people were spirited out of the city via this program, which arguably helped San Francisco, but little or nothing to reduce homelessness in the U.S. as a whole.

During the same period, San Francisco provided housing units to an additional 1,531 homeless people. In addition, the mayor’s innovative Homeless Connect program provided opportunities for hundreds of volunteers to get personally involved in delivering much needed support to homeless people. Such accomplishments need to be acknowledged, and appropriately appreciated. Thus, the pride being expressed by many of those most closely associated with the city’s effort to successfully manage the homeless problem is at least partially justified.

Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that Mayor Gavin Newsom risked a great deal when he asserted, upon taking office in 2003, that he looked forward to having the success or failure of his administration tied to his effort to substantially eliminate San Francisco’s massive population of homeless people.

The accomplishments noted above notwithstanding, it seems correspondingly appropriate to note that the Newsom administration’s engagement with homeless people has also engendered unrelenting criticism. For example, even before the Newsom administration took office critics claimed that “Care Not Cash” campaign theme was more threat than promise. That line of criticism expanded as the new administration began to cut welfare benefits to homeless people, and divert the savings to housing for members of that particular segment of the municipal populace. Major controversy continues in government circles, and among homeless advocates, regarding the Community Justice Center recently established in the Tenderloin and other poverty-stricken neighborhoods by the Newsom administration.

The Newsom administration probably deserves additional criticism for the manner in which it collaborated for several years with Bush administration policies and procedures regarding homeless people.  For example, any comprehensive review of that collaboration will quickly reveal that San Francisco was one of the most prominent of the 3,900 U.S. cities that spent much of the last decade being unduly influenced by crass politics, and intentionally inadequate funding priorities, that were more symbolic than substantive.

The key point to be understood is that the Bush administration’s policies regarding homelessness were more of less on par with its discredited pursuits of peace, fiscal sobriety and disaster relief. In other words, the Bush administration’s policies vis-à-vis poor U.S. citizens were consistently devastating for those at the bottom of the U.S. socio-economic pyramid, and that obviously includes those to poor to secure housing for themselves.

In their effort to obtain as much federal financial assistance as possible, San Francisco’s municipal officials bought into, and broadly touted, Bush administration strategies regarding the problem. Thus, primary attention was devoted to getting homeless people off the streets, and out of the sight.

Unfortunately, this approach guaranteed that substantive issues such as the causes of homelessness, the skyrocketing cost of private housing, and the fundamental transformation underway in segments of the job market historically filled by working-class people, would be largely ignored. It also encouraged, the adoption of disjointed, balkanized, difficult to manage, financially chaotic approaches to homeless people and their problems. Moreover, this approach severely inhibited critical public dialogue about the reasons why so many people were being forced into homelessness during one of the most prosperous periods in U.S. history.

One of the most important results here in San Francisco is that invaluable time has been lost in our struggle to categorically reduce the amount of unnecessary human suffering taking place on the streets of this city.  Much has been accomplished during the Newsom years, more certainly than during the tenures in office of his immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, much remains to be done.

Thousands of homeless people still inhabit our streets. The fact that many of them are new arrivals underscores one of the most important shortcomings in the programs and policies pursued during the past few years by the city’s leaders, public and private.

That key shortcoming was the core assumption that removing approximately 3,000 chronic offenders from the streets could essentially eliminate San Francisco’s homeless crisis. The fact that administration officials are currently boasting, after several years of effort, that they have actually removed 8,000 people from the streets highlights their capacity to express hubris in response to an outcome that more modest individuals might reasonably use to issue apologies.

In any event, given the economic meltdown currently underway around the world, there is every good reason to believe that the trickle of homeless people repopulating our streets will expand during the period immediately ahead into a flood of destitute people in desperate need of assistance. Unfortunately, there is a very good chance that many of those who end up in this position will be forced to fend for them.

For example, San Francisco, which is one of the nation’s wealthiest cities, is currently facing a $575.6 million budget deficit for next year. That amount is equal to approximately 50 percent of the city’s discretionary spending. The city’s fiscal situation is worse than at any time since the 1930s, and municipal officials are currently implementing massive cuts in services. The proposed cuts include services for mentally ill outpatients and drug addicts, two groups represented in disproportionately high numbers among the homeless.

At things currently stand, assistance from Washington, D.C. constitutes San Francisco’s best possible hope for avoiding the worst possible results of the impending escalation in the size and complexity of its homeless problem. But the Obama administration is currently devoting scant attention to poverty-stricken Americans in general. Any Obama administration plans to significantly expand services to homeless people, are secret at this moment.

Most signs indicate that the administration is intent on saving bankers, financiers, and various, well positioned billionaire plutocrats from experiencing the logical outcomes associated with their excesses. The Obama administration is also taking the steps it considers necessary to shore up middle-class finances and earning power.

It appears that everyone else is going to be left to their own devices. Many of the substantially abandoned souls who end up in this category will manage, somehow, to cobble together sufficient resources to survive, and possibly prosper.  But it is almost certain that many of our fellow citizens are destined during the months immediately ahead to become members of the flood of people being driven into abject poverty and desperate, life threatening homelessness, by macro-economic forces over which they have little or no control.

Here in San Francisco, we are going to need more than premature pride in order to withstand the oncoming flood of homeless people heading for our streets, alleys, parks, promenades and residential doorways.