Angela Alioto, the left, and the homeless

Photo: Dominic Fracassa, SF Chronicle

Let's start with some "progressive" bullshit on the homeless issue from Tim Redmond:

We’ve lived through a lot of bad mayors...Eight years of Gavin Newsom, who (while legalizing same-sex marriage) governed by press release and built a career on attacking homeless people...

Redmond has pushed this falsehood for years. He and the city's progressives have never faced the political reality about how badly they botched the homeless issue.

Maybe Redmond can get away with this twisted historical account with readers who weren't here during the years before Newsom was elected mayor in 2003. Those of us who were here witnessed the Bay Guardian's pathetic homeless coverage. 

That coverage included laudatory stories about Food Not Bombs and the Biotic Baking Brigade, the pie-throwers, but didn't support any serious policy initiatives to deal with the growing squalor on city streets and in city parks.

In 2002 then-supervisor Newsom got Care Not Cash (Proposition N) on the ballot, which was passed overwhelmingly by city voters. In 2003 he was elected mayor after a campaign that featured the homeless issue; city voters clearly wanted something done about it, and they weren't going to get it from Matt Gonzalez, who was Newsom's opponent in 2003.

Heather Knight in the Chronicle the other day on Angela Alioto's record on homelessness:

You’ve probably seen them by now: the 18 huge red and yellow billboards dotting the city with mayoral candidate Angela Alioto’s face and the words “Accomplished. Housed 11,362 Homeless.” What did she do? Let them all move into her guest room?Well, no.

The number may seem unbelievable, but the billboards do have some basis in fact. The figure comes from a report evaluating the city’s “Ten Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness,” an initiative begun by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004 and crafted by a council headed by Alioto.

By 2014, the city had moved 11,362 homeless single adults into permanent supportive housing. Another 8,806 were given bus tickets home to receptive family members or friends through the city’s Homeward Bound program. (Hey, any real politician would have taken credit for those, too. Come on, Angela!)

Mayor Newsom appointed Alioto chairwoman of the Ten Year Planning Council. That outraged the Guardian left, which saw her working with Newsom as a political betrayal, even though both Newsom and Alioto were/are liberal Democrats.

The original idea behind the council was to end homelessness in SF in ten years, which must be seen as a naive, unrealistic idea 15 years later (See also Homelessness in San Francisco: Ten years later).

But Alioto surely understands how difficult it is to deal with the issue, unlike Mark Leno who claimed the other day that he has a plan to end homelessness in San Francisco!

After Care Not Cash was implemented, 1,000 supposedly homeless people disappeared from the list of those receiving cash while remaining homeless.

The city's left has continued its delusional approach to the city's homeless problem. A crucial falsehood they perpetuate is that the city's homeless are primarily city residents who have just fallen on hard times: See Are the homeless really San Franciscans?