Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Bumtowns on the Pacific
Over 30 years ago, I spent the better part of the summer working in San Francisco on a three-way merger of two private companies into one public company. This merger, in one single day, would create the dominant force in the then-hot environmental testing industry. And it would make many people very rich. (Alas, not me as a mere VP finance before SOX, but I was young and there were for me many future oysters yet to be opened; undoubtedly some would reveal pearls.) I lived in the new Hyatt downtown and worked with our investment bankers, accountants, and lawyers. There were ugly surprises, last-minute tantrums, delays, and demands. We were all sworn to secrecy, yet there were street rumors and unusual stock trades. Despite all this, a three-way deal was finally completed. Exhausted, I was able to retreat to Boston, to my wife and newborn daughter.
Exciting as all this was, it was still very, very difficult. There was tremendous distrust among the parties, much of it justified, and the deal was on and off again, sometimes, it seems, daily. But the prospect of millions in liquid public equity tends to buy at least temporary forgiveness, so the deal happened. The principals put their issues and feuds aside knowing that in a single stroke, they simply could choose not to care.
I was the facilitator, something I am preternaturally good at. Despite all the angst and ultimatum, I managed to enjoy my time in San Francisco. It was much like my native town of Boston, but smaller, cleaner with no discernible poverty. The neighborhoods were less insular and, other than Chinatown, less distinctively racial. It was a friendlier, more approachable Boston with generally better weather. You could walk anywhere and everywhere. I could see why someone would want to live in San Francisco.
A decade or so later, I had to return to San Francisco, this time to work on a secondary stock offering. This time I stayed in the brand-new Four Seasons downtown. My memory of this visit was starkly different. I remember leaving the hotel in the morning and immediately being swarmed by aggressive panhandlers. Some were dressed in fuzzy animal costumes; others in standard bum garb. They were camped outside the hotel waiting for a mark. I’d never been accosted by a panhandler dressed as a filthy bunny before and I was taken aback. He was rude and demanding, even intimidating. I stood my ground and told him to back off. Upon my return to the area the following week, I stayed in a hotel in Palo Alto, ostensibly to be nearer the attorney’s office, but in great part to avoid the unpleasant experiences of fending off the street creatures lurking outside the Four Seasons in San Francisco.
Another decade would pass and I would move my growing family to Phoenix. Each summer we would spend a week in California to escape the desert heat. On our first trip to LA, Universal Studios, Malibu Beach, etc., we visited the Chinese Theater and the walk of stars. There we were met with a small mob of street people dressed as various characters. Looking back, some were rather dingy, but it was all pretty tame. They charged $5 for a photo op and it seemed to add something a little Disneyesque to the scene. There was an abundance of Elmos, some rather sad and dirty, I remember. It seemed to me a rather poor strategy to be filthy when seeking people for a photo op. Perhaps Oscar the Grouch would have been a better choice.
Our summer excursions became exclusively San Diego trips and I grew to know that city like a native. It had everything – weather Hawaiians could envy, beautiful nearby beaches, nice hotels, the new Gaslight restaurant district, summer outdoor concerts, baseball, Balboa Park, the Zoo, Old Town, Seaport Village, on and on. It became our home away from home. But then, something changed. It started at the busy downtown street corners. Homeless bums staked out their territory jealously and when you passed, they demanded money. I remembered this kind of panhandling from years before in San Francisco. I also remember commenting to my wife that I hoped our adoptive vacation home had not been so infected. These contacts were intermittent, so I dismissed it as a bad day.
The next year, however, we started to notice the deterioration, the crowds of aggressive homeless on the beach and the street corners now nearly all populated by a predatory bum. The small city parks near downtown had turned into encampments, unapproachable. The homeless disease from San Francisco had spread and overtaken our beloved San Diego. I announced that this would be my last vacation in California. It had been turned inhospitable by a failure to deal with indigents. That was over five years ago and I have kept my promise with the exception of a single weekend with my wife. It’s a damn shame.
This crisis in California, which has now spread to Portland and Seattle, is a crisis decades in the making. I’ve watched it grow and metastasize over the past 30-plus years. It has rendered five major metropolitan areas inhospitable. Call it misguided compassion. Call it facilitated indigence. Call it whatever you like, but it is a mess of the local political leadership’s own design and has been festering for decades.
Published in General
Mirrors my experience.
Lived in California twice, LA in 82-83, then Sacramento 90-97. Used to love going to SF, then early noticed a deterioration.
We would go at Christmas with our kids and stay around Union Square. The last year was when we were leaving for breakfast from our hotel and a bum was defecating right in the doorway.
Also loved going to SD, my kids loved the air and space museum and the Imax in Balboa park. That stopped when one morning we got there early, and saw a scene out of the Walking Dead. A huge army of the homeless was shuffling out of the park to scatter around the city until night time when they would reoccupy the park for the night.
California especially the big cities are Exhibit A on what a Progressive hammerlock can do to an area.
I spent a week in San Francisco roughly 20 years ago. I stayed down town and attended technical training in one of the buildings down town that was 6 or 8 blacks away. My experience then mirrored yours from 30 years ago. I walked from the hotel to the training and back again every day, and went out for lunch each day. It was pleasant. My wife came down for the weekend and we went and saw the sites. Of course there were homeless and panhandlers, but nothing like what people report today.
As for Seattle, well, reports are dramatically overblown. As with anything, it depends on where you go. The city has major problems brought on by decades of progressive nonsense, to be sure. But it isn’t inhospitable to the average person.
The Progressives here in California created most of the homeless. One cannot severely restrict new housing, drive up housing costs through the roof, destroy the industrial base and the opportunity for millions of jobs for young men, refuse to maintain and to build infrastructure sufficient to care for you growing population,and help destroy the family structure causing many of our young to experience mental illness without expect to create millions of mentally ill homeless.
Caring for the Homeless is big business and a very lucrative one for many in the Government/NGO world, so in a State absolutely controlled by government types it should not be surprising to find this business growing by leaps and bounds.
They target places popular with visitors and take advantage those unfamiliar with those areas. Sure, as a local you can avoid them, but why should anyone have to give up access to formerly accessible areas now overrun with vagrants? Tolerance and avoidance are part of the problem.
We are conducting a real demonstration of Government effectiveness here in SF at the moment. The City bum budget just doubled effective 1/1/2020, and we have a brand new invitation-only bum center right next to the waterfront and ballpark. It is called a “navigation center”. What do you all think of that euphemism?Trump has put the spotlight on the City and Gov Dreamboat has put the spotlight on his “housing first” policy and how mean Trump is.
I think my local government is utterly clueless regarding human nature and how the real world actually works. I think the local voting population is lockstep in agreement with the local government.
Make your predictions and watch it unfold.
San Francisco, then all of California, made it easy to be a bum, from free handouts to lack of enforcement of public order and decency. In market terms, they sent a message that they demanded bums. And lo and behold, they have them aplenty. Who knew?
The interesting question is why do they demand bums?
Everything we need to know about how to prevent or ameliorate poverty was described perfectly by Frank Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life. :-)
I spent many years living in CA. Our last home was in San Clemente, between LA and San Diego. We decided we would no longer visit California due to the impossible traffic, north and south. Now we have more reasons not to return. I hope San Clemente maintains its charm.
My only time being accosted by a bum was in downtown Atlanta in 1992. He had a bum eye, walked with and stared at me for 1/2 of a block. It isn’t only in California, but it should be outlawed.
I’m not as bothered by those with a sign who don’t bother you, but I still dislike it.
Leftists always need an underclass to patronize, and pretend they are helping. To make themselves look compassionate, spending more and more, resulting in a larger underclass which never goes away.
I believe that Rudi Giuliani’s claim to fame as mayor of New York was cracking down on the little misdemeanors that trash a city.
I wanted to do some high end Christmas shopping his year that would ordinarily mean Union Square in SF. But mindful of the reports and parking/transit challenges I opted for Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto instead. Even then I passed by an incredible number of RVs parked to “house” workers in Silicon Valley. This will not end well.
When will they produce a movie about a homeless Google employee who simply “lives” in the office? Free food. Multiple gyms with shower facilities. A locker to store clothing. Free laundry facilities on site. Sleeping pods. Who needs an apartment anyway?
Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s Orange County (Santa Ana) did engage in an effort to control the vagrant population in the county civic center (courthouse, law library, county government offices) and nearby parks, specifically citing that without control, the spaces could not be used for the very purposes for which they had been designed. There were a few cries even then about “compassion” for the homeless, but those cries were countered with data about the much larger number of people who were being prevented from using facilities for the purposes for which they had been built.
Part of the logic applied to the government officials was that, if residents couldn’t use facilities, voters were likely not to approve bonds or taxes for additional facilities. So if you politicians want voters to support politicians’ natural desire to build things, you politicians had better clean up the vagrant issue that is keeping residents (voters) from using facilities. Since I left California in 2000, I have not kept up with whether that effort continued.
Well, I haven’t seen that in Seattle. we primarily go to the touristy areas when we are there. Pike Place Market, the water front, Seattle Center, etc. And though there are homeless people around, they don’t seem to bother anyone.
We go up to Seattle 2-3 times a year to visit our son. We won’t go down to Pike Place, Seattle Center, any of the restaurants around Lake Union, or any of the shopping areas downtown because of the scum. Our son lives up in Queen Anne and it’s infesting that area as well. If you’re not seeing it you’re being willfully blind.
I refuse to go into Portland proper anymore. Shoot, we’re starting to see piles of homeless crap and people sleeping beside the road in Beaverton-Aloha-Hillsboro. Lord I can’t wait to leave this area.
Oh, ok. I guess you are right.
It’s been around a long time.
When I lived in Washington DC in the early 1990s there were a lot of homeless people sleeping in parks, on pavements, in ATM cubicles, in the public library toilets (if you dared to go). Most of them seemed to suffer from a mental health issue, and most of them seemed to have an addiction problem as well.
(The same thing has started to become apparent here in Sydney – where street sleepers suddenly appeared in numbers about three years ago.)
I don’t know what the solution would be, but most of those people would have a long road back to pulling their own weight and renting a place to live in the market place – if that was even a realistic goal (and for most of them I doubt that it is).
I wouldn’t hire them and I wouldn’t rent to them – but they still need to be some place. If we stay focused on unrealistic solutions that place is the street.
https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/11/san-clemente-votes-to-close-emergency-homeless-campsite/
Who benefits from this? I won’t go to San Francisco for a meeting anymore, much less a vacation. This harms the cities involved and should lead even brain-dead progressives to seek a solution.
Progressives accommodate homelessness more than Conservatives but they didn’t create it by themselves. It was created by the whole country. If San Francisco voted Republican tomorrow would that resolve homelessness or would it just move the homeless somewhere else?
No, that’s false. I didn’t create homelessness, nor did my family or community. Closing down mental hospitals and failing to arrest vagrants are much more at fault.
Do we vote for the Governments that do these things or not? What about Governments that reduce public funding for mental health or addiction in order to reduce our taxes?
Ditto re trade agreements that basically have us import products of low skill assembly – which lowers the cost of these products but also results in significantly fewer low skilled jobs at home.
There’s more to it than zoning restrictions (which are locally voted on).
Your comment got me googling about the housing supply and demand problem. And what a pitiful situation it is in Mountain View. It’s different than choices about dealing with the panhandling indigent homeless. But it all points to deteriorating towns in a naturally gorgeous part of the country. Thanks for your post.
You also just lost Oracle Openworld (which is what, 70,000 visitors, all on expense accounts?) to Las Vegas.
But I’m sure that was just because of the cost of hotel rooms.
I haven’t been to Seattle now in a few years, but back in the 90s and early 00s spent a few scattered weekends in the downtown area. It was a fun hangout.
The last time or two I went (let’s say over the last decade), the public square near the main train station had gotten significantly seedier. I don’t get why cities let this happen.
California does not have a housing problem. They have an addiction and mental illness problem. Offer most of those homeless people housing and they will turn it down in favor of the streets. As with all things, the first step is to properly identify the problem. California has missed the root cause completely. Then again, there are much better avenues for graft and corruption making “housing first” than actually fixing the problems.
$700,000 for a unit of housing??
So why is it that only Progressive Paradises have this problem?
Progressives
Hate to build housing and put in onerous housing laws.
Foster lax enforcement of drug laws.
Handcuff the police in dealing with addicts, criminals and the homeless
Tons of money is pumped into the Welfare/Homeless complex. Most of it goes to lining the pockets of bureaucrats and ” non profits”. Very little does anything that has any real impact.
Nothing to do with this particular problem, but a great argument for controlling immigration and the border.