The city's left and the homeless

Photo: Jessica Christian

From Heather Knight's story last week in the S.F. Chronicle (More talk, less action on effort to get mentally ill homeless off street):

...At issue is state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to give counties more control over conservatorship programs for the mentally ill.

Currently, state law says that counties can hospitalize people for 72 hours against their will only if they pose a danger to themselves or somebody else or are gravely disabled, such as not being able to feed themselves. The county can go before a judge to ask for a 14-day extension and repeat the process every 30 days.

Wiener’s proposal is pretty mild. He wants to give counties more control over their own conservatorship rules, wants more supportive housing units attached to the conservatorship slots, and wants severe drug addiction to be a factor in qualifying for conservatorship. A person would have to be chronically homeless, mentally ill and severely drug addicted to be conserved under his proposal...

Two weeks ago, supervisors took up a resolution from board President London Breed supporting Wiener’s proposal. Because it was fast-tracked, coming to the board without a committee hearing, it needed eight votes to pass. 

Breed continued it to Tuesday because her colleagues wanted more time to review it. On Tuesday, those supervisors said they still didn’t know enough about it and voted it down. Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Norman Yee, Sandra Lee Fewer, Hillary Ronen and Jane Kim declined to support it.

Even though Barbara Garcia, the director of the Department of Public Health, and Jeff Kositsky, the director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, support it. And even though if it passes in Sacramento, these same politicians will get the chance to talk about it a whole lot more before deciding whether to join the optional program and what they want a San Francisco conservatorship program to look like...

Rob's comment:

That vote by the "progressive" supervisors is consistent with how city progs have been on the homeless issue for more than 20 years. They have never felt any sense of urgency about the problem. They never saw the fact that more than 100 homeless people were dying on our streets every year was an ongoing emergency.

I wrote this in 2005:

In short, the left didn't seem to believe that the homeless problem could be solved. The implication was that homelessness is just something we have to live with under capitalism. This wasn't a political failure---a matter of trying something and failing---but an intellectual failure that led to a peculiar political passivity on the issue. 

And then Gavin Newsom, much to progressive annoyance, took possession of the issue and used it to get himself elected mayor. The sour response to Mayor Newsom's early Care Not Cash success suggests that the left doesn't want the city to succeed in its struggle with homelessness. How's that for a progressive agenda on homelessness?

When Newsom tried to put on a community forum on homelessness, the oh-so-cute members of the city's political left disrupted it and tried to make it a joke.

See also Oh Gavin, you're such a bitch!, Homelessness in SF: The silence of the progs, and Progressive mythology on homelessness.