California's Homeless: Hundreds of Millions of Dollars, a Garden Hose, and the Same Old Story

San Francisco and Los Angeles have budgeted hundreds of millions of dollars for homeless services. Will anything change? If a new statewide study and a 10-second viral video are any indication, the answer is "No".

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By Eric Butterfield

 

July 14, 2023

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The persistence of California's homeless population begs the question whether the Golden State is completely unable to solve this problem. With all the talent and energy on the West Coast, decades of efforts have yielded little. The topic stirs up plenty of passion and hostility. Having lived in San Francisco for 14 years, I've seen it up close, and how nothing ever seemed to change for the better.

 

That perception is not entirely accurate, however. According to San Francisco's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the number of homeless people in San Francisco has actually decreased significantly since the peak in 2002, when homelessness was 11 percent higher than today. Still, that leaves over 7,700 people homeless in San Francisco, a tragedy by any measure. Overall, California today is home to 30 percent of nation's homeless population, and half of the nation's homeless living on the streets.

 

Frustration with this housing and humanitarian problem went viral in January 2023 when a homeless woman in San Francisco got sprayed with a hose. A passerby recorded it on video and shared it online, and—boom!—the internet exploded and people's faces melted off in rage. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the online video "ignited fury" and quickly reached 10.7 million views on Twitter, where it was shared thousands of times. Ah, yes, the wisdom of the internet and deep insight of social media. By contrast, the comments thread accompanying the SF Chronicle story overwhelmingly shows the frustrations of San Francisco's residents—not with hose-wielding taxpayers, but with the homeless people who live on the streets. Other targets of the opprobrium were feckless political spendthrifts and the sensationalist media.

 

As of the evening of January 10, 2023, the story headline was, "S.F. man admits spraying homeless woman with hose in video sparking outrage". Outrage always sells. But by early evening the next day, the headline had been toned down to read: "Police are investigating case of S.F. man spraying homeless woman with a hose."

 

The man admitted he sprayed the woman. But he also said he's tried to help her repeatedly, and had to pick up after her messes. The most telling "fury" here is in the news story comments, which overwhelmingly support the assailant, though not his turning the hose on the poor woman. Such comments, which repeatedly cite the ongoing failure of the city's politicians, had received anywhere from six times to 14 times more "thumbs up" reactions than "thumbs down" responses in the 10 days following the story's publication.

 

Yes, this incident "ignited fury" alright—but the reaction to the written news story was the polar opposite of the outrage elicited by the 10-second video clip. Might this teach us a lesson about the wisdom of short-attention-span social media entertainment versus a more fleshed-out narrative?

 

 

From the Age of Aquarius to Always Filthy Streets

 

Like many other pilgrims to San Francisco, I fell in love with the city's enchanting architecture and unique sense of place, the crazy contrasts of a vibrant modern culture in a walkable city. The Victorian houses on narrow streets, with neighborhoods tucked in between hills and steep, ascending staircases, lends its own charming escape from modern life. There was always something new to discover. And, 1960s Summer of Love nostalgia had a special appeal, since I'd grown up listening to a lot of '60s rock music, though I'd come of age in the 1980s.

 

I first lived in the city in the Haight-Ashbury in 1992. The hippie nostalgia was familiar; three years earlier I had attended a make-shift twentieth anniversary celebration of the Woodstock music festival at the original concert site outside Bethel, New York. On Haight Street, dropouts in baggy patchwork clothing and puffy hats would spend all day sitting on the sidewalk around a peace sign they'd drawn with chalk. "Spare change for the peace, anyone?" they'd ask people as they walked past. I was living the Bohemian dream, sharing a one-bedroom studio apartment with four people: a couple and a platonic female friend, with whom I shared a bed. By day, I took the bus downtown to work as a bank teller.

 

In through the living room window would float tidbits of spaced-out conversation from the sidewalk below.

"Where are we going?" said a man one day to his friend as they pushed a rattling shopping cart. "Oh yeah, to get cigarettes."

"I want doughnuts," said the friend.

 

Most of these characters of the Haight-Ashbury were addled but harmless, the anachronistic holdouts still waiting for the Age of Aquarius, smoking weed by day beneath the wall mural depicting the prophets of rock and roll lost to its overdose epidemic. They panhandled by day and slept in Golden Gate Park at night. Hippies and dropouts, magical thinkers and hipsters and psychedelic experimenters and alternative living advocates. It all seemed like a big adventure, an extended childhood you could always outgrow when you were ready. But 30 years on, it's hard not to think that part of the cost of free love and the Baby Boomers' Age of Aquarius is persistent homelessness in San Francisco.

 

 

Perpetual Homelessness

 

Because the assailant in the viral video is an art gallery owner, the story now had all the juicy bits of a socially advantaged property owner disenfranchising a marginalized victim. But anger over the mistreatment of a homeless woman is just the beginning of the story.

 

Only after the SF Chronicle reported on the "fury" over the video, did the reporters offer that the homeless woman was belligerent and pestering the business owner, had thrown trash all over the sidewalk, and had been a nuisance for some time. The man finally lost his cool after trying to help her repeatedly—but that's not a storyline for online viral fame. All we need is 10 seconds of video to know everything and to click a mad-face emoji over it. Knee-jerk reactions feel so good, but the story is years—no, decades—in the making. Welcome to the "information" age.

 

It isn't as if the gallery owner, Collier Gwin of Foster Gwin Gallery, suddenly hosed down someone in his entryway. San Francisco Board President Aaron Peskin told the Chronicle that his office had tried to help Cora, or "Q" as she is known, for several years. Make note: Years of city government efforts failed to get the woman off the streets, leaving a beleaguered business owner to clean up after her. One thing's for sure: It's not for a lack of trying—or at least spending a lot of money. The 2022-2023 budget for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (DHSH) is $672 million. That's enough to buy more than 50 mansions every year in San Francisco's upscale Sea Cliff neighborhood. In 2021, additional FEMA COVID-19 funding put the war chest at over $1 billion. What do San Francisco's taxpayers get for that kind of money? The DHSH department says its budget "is characterized by significant investments in housing, shelter, and equity across the system." Significant indeed: Not counting additional FEMA money, that's over $86,000 annually per person in shelter or on the street.

 

The story is very similar in Southern California, where Los Angeles County supervisors announced $609 million for homeless services for the next fiscal year. Not to be outdone, the L.A. City Council budgeted a staggering $1.3 billion for homeless programs.

 

On the night of January 18, 2023, Gwin was arrested and taken into police custody. The night before, 17 cars had been broken into in just one night—in one neighborhood, Cow Hollow. Given the astronomical amount of money spent by the Board of Supervisors, and lack of success, I say only half in jest that some among them should instead have been put in handcuffs and taken downtown. On July 10, 2023, Gwin was ordered to complete 35 hours of community service.

 

At least there's some good news to report. According to DHSH's Point-In-Time Count report, there were roughly 4,400 homeless people on the city's streets in 2022, a decrease of roughly 15 percent, from 5,180 in 2019. The report also says the number of people staying in shelters increased 18 percent during this same time, from 2,855 to 3,357. Chronic homelessness has decreased 11 percent since 2019, although in 2022 there were still almost 2,700 chronically homeless people on San Francisco's streets.

 

 

Blaming and Scapegoating

 

In a joint statement issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), the video is described as showing "a man violently assaulting an unhoused woman". They go on to call it a "violent and inhumane attack" and further implicate the city in contributing to the situation.

 

This language sounds a bit purple. Spraying the woman with water was certainly unkind (I watched the video). But calling it a violent attack uses language they don't tend to apply to physical assaults by homeless people. Gwin told the Chronicle that prior to the video-recorded episode, the woman had been screaming and spitting at him. Isn't spitting more violent than a water hose? Gwin also said he'd been trying to help her for a long time.

 

The ACLU/LCCR lawyers' joint statement leads up to this juicy description: "Violence like this assault occurs in the context of government, societal, and press participation in scapegoating unhoused residents and treating them as though they are objects to be swept, jailed, and harassed, instead of working toward solutions to homelessness like affordable housing." That's a mouthful of context. I thought the press were scapegoating the gallery owner. If the government is scapegoating the homeless, why is it budgeting $672 million in an effort to help them? I'll give the lawyers this: One of the elephants in the room is affordable housing.

 

Not much new housing gets built in part because land and labor are so expensive in San Francisco. This helps drive up rental prices—but so does rent control, which keeps units off the market. If I had stayed in the two-bedroom apartment my wife and I vacated in 2011, today it would be 31% less expensive than the going rate, due to the allowable rent increases by the Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board. It's one reason people hold on to their apartments—moving gets expensive. Many of the renters benefitting from rent control make over $100,000 a year, and don't need it, unlike the elderly on fixed incomes, who do.

 

Nearly 30 years after I first lived in San Francisco, it's still the same swirl of ineffective abstractions. Affordable housing, yes. Jobs programs, yes. But when you hear "in the context of", you know you're about to hear someone shadowbox with concepts, to no effect. I won't pretend to know what "Q" is battling daily, but it doesn't sound to me like government scapegoating is a primary issue.

 

I am glad that attorneys take the work to defend the homeless. But the pervasive use of abstract phrases that deflect all personal responsibility from the homeless themselves solves nothing. Have these attorneys visited the sidewalk tent bazaars lining the streets south of Market or in the Tenderloin? If so, I think they'd be compelled to report that in the context of drug dealers, drug addicts, and the mentally ill who live on the streets, responsible and peaceful citizens get scapegoated and sometimes attacked with much worse than water from a garden hose. We're not even living in the same reality anymore.

 

By all means, get the mentally ill the help they need. Let's try to get drug addicts the counseling they need—if they'll accept it (low probability when sobriety requirements no longer exist). Build more affordable housing—a lot of it. But let's also ask something of the able-bodied who have learned to be victims of abstract, squishy sociological concepts rather than feel a responsibility to be self-reliant and contribute to society rather than blame it. Bad life choices breed bad outcomes.

 

New Study of Homelessness in California: No Surprises

 

On June 20, 2023, the University of California San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative released a massive study, the biggest of its kind since the mid-1990s. Dubbed the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, the study involved 3,200 questionnaires and 365 interviews with homeless adults. The report offers a lot of interesting data, but sadly, most of it is not surprising, if you've ever observed homeless people for any length of time.

 

The saddest statistic is this: Two-thirds of the respondents reported mental health issues. Roughly half of the interviewees reported severe depression and/or anxiety, and 12 percent reported hallucinations—but only 18 percent had received mental health treatment recently. Only 9 percent had received any mental health counseling and just 14 percent had been prescribed psychiatric medications.

 

What's not surprising: 80 percent reported that they are abusing drugs or alcohol—and only 20 percent want treatment. How are hundreds of millions of dollars going to go to good use if only one in four people who are abusing drugs or alcohol actually want treatment?

 

The study, however, prefers this wording: "Twenty percent of those who report current regular use of illicit drugs or heavy episodic alcohol use reported that they wanted treatment, but were unable to receive it." Note that the emphasis is not on the majority who don't what help—it's on the small minority who do want help can't get it.

 

The study also cites the high percentage of former convicts who had not received services. It also mentions the high amount of violence suffered by homeless people living on the streets, but doesn't explore the probability of ex-convicts being the victimizers. There are no judgements leveled against the bad behavior that landed some now-homeless people in jail or prison in the first place. The only focus here is on a lack of government services.

 

For example, the study says that 21 percent of leaseholders blamed a loss of income on losing their housing. What's missing is why these people lost their jobs. People lose jobs all the time from no fault of their own. But, given the high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse—and no desire for treatment—it's worth asking what behaviors might have contributed to losing a job.

 

Another unexplored statistic is that 43 percent of people who weren't on a lease were not paying rent prior to becoming homeless. That's called couch surfing or freeloading. If you're not paying rent, it's understood that you pitch in enough to earn your keep, or you're down to your last straw before becoming homeless. Nonetheless, 70 percent of respondents believe that a rental subsidy of $300 to $500 would have prevented them from becoming homeless. Of these non-rent-paying residents, 13 percent say they left due to a conflict in the household; 11 percent said they didn't want to impose any longer.

 

Why do homeless people need a rental subsidy? Possibly because they don't work enough: "Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly." I don't mean to make light of high rents. We need more affordable housing. But given that such a high percentage are under employed, you'd think that they'd all be looking for work—but most are not. Only 44 percent are looking for a job, which is moderately higher than the 31 percent who are doing meth and the 16 percent who are drinking heavily.

 

Given these statistics, you'd think that a correlation might be drawn between heavy drinking, doing drugs, not looking for a job, and becoming homeless. Instead, we get these hopeful beliefs: "82 percent believed receiving a one-time payment of $5,000-$10,000 would have prevented their homelessness." Along the same lines, 90 percent thought a housing choice voucher would have prevented their becoming homeless. Maybe so. Housing costs were named by 89 percent of respondents as a barrier to getting back into permanent housing. Everything costs money, including children. Twenty-six percent of homeless women ages 18 to 44 (or, as they say, "assigned female at birth") said they'd been pregnant while living unsheltered. Eight percent told the interviewer they were currently pregnant.

 

Few people in the UCSF study were receiving treatment for substance abuse (few wanted it). Thirty-one percent reported regular methamphetamine use, 11 percent were using opioids, and 16 percent were drinking heavily. Nearly one-fourth reported that substance use was causing them health, legal or financial problems. Nonetheless, a low percentage reported that they wanted treatment or were looking for a job, yet they believe that a government handout would have saved them from homelessness. Here's an unasked yet obvious question: Do you think your own behavior contributed to becoming homeless?

 

Can we expect government services to get results when the individual will to get with the program is lacking? Government programs won't improve anyone's decision-making skills or willingness to work without the personal will to do so. Substance abuse treatment aims to rid people of those bad habits—but if most people don't want help, who are we kidding? The Housing First program, which receives federal funding, does not require sobriety of the people it purports to help.

 

The UCSF study reports that 19 percent of the homeless had been to jail or prison. Tthe study doesn't call them criminals—that would be stigmatizing. Instead, they are "participants who entered homelessness from institutional settings" who "reported not having received transition services." That's strange language. There's no individual autonomy in any of it. It's worth asking whether someone who's committed a serious enough crime to receive a lengthy incarceration might also be more prone to becoming homeless? Well, that's not how today's academicians tend to talk. That would involve a direct discussion about free will, personal failure, and taking responsibility for the repercussions of individual decisions. Instead, criminals are now "participants" with experiences "marked by … interactions with the criminal justice system". They also lead lives "marked by significant health challenges, high use of drugs and alcohol". Who's doing the marking? Doesn't anyone actually do anything anymore? No one gets up every day and abuses their mind and body with intoxicants. Now they're all just "marked by experiences".

 

Similarly, the study refers to unemployment as a "substantial disconnection from labor markets". Although the study claims "many were looking for work" it fails to emphasize the proportion: "Only 18% reported income from jobs". That's a substantial disconnection from work. Why? For one, only 44 percent reported looking for a job. Eight percent reported formal employment and 11 percent had informal employment (no definition offered). At least those younger than 62 who aren't disabled showed a little more initiative, with 55 percent reporting that they were looking for a job. So, essentially twice as many homeless people think a monthly stipend would help them (86 percent) than are looking for work.

 

These statistics are instructive and offer an opportunity to raise additional questions about a wide range of issues. The big elephant in the room is mental illness. Nobody wants the mentally ill living on the streets. That's just cruelty, plain and simple. Nobody wants drug addicts in their neighborhood. But responsible citizens get demonized for being fed up with government incompetence that costs $672 million a year in San Francisco. Los Angeles has tapped its taxpayers for a similar sum. Some of these people can be violent. They leave trash and filth on the streets. Not only have we failed the vulnerable in California by proving unable to house the poor and mentally ill—we've also failed everyone else by expanding the definition of "unhoused" to be anybody who lives on the streets, refuses treatment, and doesn't look for a job.

 

I'm not saying unfair housing practices or an untimely and unearned job loss have not played a role in many cases. But when such a high percentage of the homeless have problems that result directly from their own behavior, it's worth asking how much responsibility these people bear for how their lives are shaping up, including when they make choices that result in police involvement, a criminal conviction, a lengthy prison sentence, or a pregnancy.

 

 

"Spare Change for the Peace, Anyone?"

 

Some people living on San Francisco's streets (Haight Street in particular) simply spend their days begging for "spare change for the peace" because they can. If you can do that all day, you're certainly not unfit to work.

 

My first-hand experiences include living at the edge of the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco, where young adults shot up heroin on the sidewalk in front of an abandoned parking garage. I usually had good experiences with sellers of the Street Sheet, a periodical written and sold for a donation by the homeless themselves. I like the self-reliance and community involvement of the endeavor. But after a seller suddenly became confrontational and threw a glass bottle at me and my friends that shattered in the street, I had second thoughts.

 

Another night, I got jumped by a huge, muscular man who looked to be high on crack, who then tried to hit me in the face with a roundhouse punch. Thankfully, I was able to duck the punch and get away. All of these incidents occurred inside of three years. I never owned a car in that neighborhood, and not only because parking was scarce—I suspected an expensive break-in was likely. More recently, a mile away from my old neighborhood, someone did just that—broke into my car and stole a jacket.

 

The defense lawyers for the homeless are unlikely to describe such thefts, violent assaults, vagrancy, and other "quality of life" crimes in such direct terms—but spraying someone with a hose gets described as a violent assault.

 

Only when we describe people's actions universally in real-world terms, rather than employing "context" in an uneven way, can we truly confront a problem. People who are homeless are not a monolithic block of people. Some suffer from mental illness, some from drug addition, while others have simply lost their job (one-fourth according to one study), or simply have lost hope. Not everyone is challenged in the same way.

 

Media Distortions

 

When reporters convey the outrage of people who watched a 10-second video, but ignore the outrage of long-time citizens., they do us all a disservice. It's the residents who suffer the negative impacts on their communities—and pay the exorbitant tax bill for what often looks like government ineptitude. It's also a disservice to claim such enormous governmental programs need only bureaucratic accountability, permanent funding, reform, and permanent housing, etc., without assessing the willingness to cooperate from the homeless themselves. Those are all nice phrases about program effectiveness, but where's the real problem with someone who doesn't want your help with their addiction but believes a big cash handout will deliver them from homelessness?

 

San Francisco spends $672 million every year on homeless initiatives. (That's $13.7 million per square mile.) L.A. County's budget for homeless services is $609 million. In May 2023, the L.A. City Council approved an historic $1.3 billion for programs serving the homeless. Proposals by San Francisco Mayor London Breed and other supervisors aim to spend millions of dollars so drug addicts can shoot up drugs with clean needles.

 

On a positive note: A 2020 UCSF study of the homeless in Santa Clara County offers some hope: Permanent housing for chronically homeless people still had 93 percent of recipients housed after six months. It's no slam dunk, however. Seventy percent of those 169 people needed more than one placement to keep them housed.

 

The people in this study, however, are only a small portion of the homeless population (by one estimate just 5 percent to 10 percent of the chronically homeless population). They're the ones who most frequently need acute medical care, emergency services, and psychiatric intervention. In the two years prior to the study, these people averaged 20 trips to the emergency department, five hospitalizations, five psychiatric emergency service calls, and three trips to a jail.

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It is all a sad state of affairs. In San Francisco, Cora appears to be homeless because she can not care for herself. Apparently, no one in her life is able to fill that role. Neither can the city government. For the $86,000 budgeted this year by city taxpayers on her behalf, you'd think she could have been helped before a business owner got so fed up that he sprayed her with a hose. Maybe the flame-throwers on social media would have responded differently if the video had been titled: "Here's $86,000 of your tax dollars hard at work".