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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
Return to San Diego!!!!! after the Hep A outbreak, the Republican mayor Kevin Faulcner eradicated the tent cities, and got all the local communities/cities to commit to seltering the vagrants or getting them to move on. There are still vagrants but no more encampments. I live just south of the city of San Diego, and the turn around in these last few years is so remarkable as to be miraculous. Republican mayors rull!!!!!!!!!!
I think you’re correct on the problem that exists with these homeless people, but I think the pols perceive it to be so, to them it’s an asset on which they can – free of criticism, lest the criticizer be labeled something vile – use as a blanket of empathy to their re-election. This issue won’t be corrected or even attempted to be corrected, until public sentiment makes it necessary to do so.
The visible homeless are clustered in large urban centres for a number of reasons, and it’s the visible homeless (living on the street during the day and perhaps also the night) who set the tone of the public’s response to homelessness. I think.
These urban centres vote overwhelmingly Democrat. If there were some that voted Republican one could compare and contrast approaches and results, but there don’t seem to be any.
Also: urban centres are generally part of a larger metropolitan region, and it makes sense to assess what drives homelessness in the context of that region rather than just its inner city. Their economies are discrete – and perhaps that’s why looking at homelessness at a national level would be most effective.
If that has been the basic the issue, what stopped all of Washington DC’s homeless from crossing the border into Maryland or Virginia and finding jobs and homes?
They deal with criminals by sending them to jail (which homes them, I guess, and if you criminalise homelessness that’s one way of approaching it), but how do the police solve addiction?
If that’s what keeps happening, that’s what we’re voting for. In a Democracy we are ultimately responsible for our Government’s policies and their implementation.
Interesting article here re the working homeless in NYC, published in 2017 (going by the link). From which:
I think if the value of unskilled labor went up then the number of working homeless might go down.
Not every city in America is governed by far Left Progressives. And those cities don’t have this problem.
LOL.
Maryland around DC and Northern Virginia are controlled by, wait for it, Progressives
Families tend to go to shelters, and aren’t the problem. I’m all for a border wall, enforcement of visa over stays and enforcing work rules against hiring illegals. And funny thing, under Trump and the booming economy and a tightening job market low end wages have started to go up for the first time in over a decade.
But, the street people are almost all drug or alcohol addicted and mentally ill. Those have nothing to do with immigration. Once upon a time they would either be in large psych facilities, or would live in skid row flop houses, cheap nasty places to live, but better than the street. Both those options were done away with in the name of Progress.