Good morning 🌞 time for a thread on why San Francisco allows so many people experiencing severe, untreated mental illness to continue living on our streets, causing harm to themselves and their communities. Buckle up, we’re going way back…
BREAKING VIDEO: A raging, high, dangerous
#NathanielRoye
at Greenwich at Laguna drops the N-word and F-bombs; threatens a woman and chases her, throws bins and nearly hits a cyclist, car, and mail truck. Punches a vehicle, breaks mirror.
@SFDAOffice
@SFPDChief
I was confused to see lefty Gen Z people posting positive things about North Korea, so I checked what I correctly assumed was the source of this propaganda - TikTok. I found a surprising amount of pro-DPRK videos with significant reach. 🧵
Imagine living in a single family home with a garage and somehow believing that you’re also entitled to use part of a public sidewalk as your private parking. Muni and BART aren’t free, so why should car owners get to park on a public right of way for free?
I could keep going further down this rabbit hole as there are entire TikTok accounts dedicated to “expanding the narrative” on North Korea, but I hear Pyongyang has “the best nightlife” so I’m off to book my flight.
These two represent a popular genre of pro-DPRK propaganda: quick videos of daily life that make everyone look normal and happy. Seems like these are designed to open your mind to the idea that North Korea isn’t as bad as Western media makes it out to be.
Then once you’re onboard, they humanize Kim Jong Un by showing him being cute with his daughter. Surely this guy can’t be as bad as they say he is, right?
We’re officially launching our Reject AIPAC campaign, which demands that federal candidates decline endorsements and financial contributions from right-wing lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 🔥🔥🔥
One thing I will never understand is why, in a state full of single family homes, garages, and abundant suburban street parking, people who are so attached to these amenities choose to live in the densest, most transit friendly city.
Why do so many San Franciscans park in their driveways, blocking the sidewalk? Our readers wanted to know, so we asked people: Why don’t you park in your garage?
My latest column: On the streets of San Francisco, Bill Gene Hobbs, a serial batterer of women, had all the power.
In court, he lost it, mocking and yelling at his victims before being sentenced to 5 1/2 years behind bars and sex offender registration.
Update: San Francisco’s SIP hotel program will cost the city over $44 million in legal settlements alone. That is enough to stand up over 1,600 new shelter beds.
I count almost $25 million in SIP hotel settlement costs so far. And it is still unclear how much of the $385.95 million in total claims we’ve filed with FEMA for the program will be reimbursed.
Minneapolis Federal Reserve did a study on the city's flat & decling rents, finding that for every 100 market rate apartments built, 70 existing apartments were freed up in low income neighborhoods.
What lessons on gentrification can be extracted here.
Imagine taking off work and standing around City Hall all day just waiting for the opportunity to yell over someone for bringing up thoroughly reported and verified allegations of sexual assault perpetrated by a terrorist organization.
An SF Board of Supervisors committee passed a ceasefire resolution.
@MattDorsey
asked to include language about Hamas’s mass sexual violence against Israeli women & was met with shouts of “liar” — part of a QAnon/January 6-style conspiracy theory that these rapes didn’t happen.
As a trans woman who works with Tom on several issues, I can confidently say he has always treated me with the utmost respect and kindness, unlike some “progressives” who have been blatantly transphobic to me. So with all due respect
@fbach4
don’t use trans people to slander him.
@fbach4
Show me any tweet of mine where I've ever spoken out against trans rights. Or any media appearance for that matter You're committing slander Jenny and it's a bad, bad look.
Many online leftist types don’t get this, but one reason illegal fireworks are so dangerous in San Francisco is because we live in a dense city full of old, wood-frame buildings. And thanks to our abysmal permitting processes, most buildings take years to repair after a fire.
many online urbanist types don’t get this, but one reason gentrification is so resented is that it siphons taxpayer dollars inefficiently toward stomping on any spontaneous activity that makes a city even a little fun. to say nothing of when the stomping gets people killed
San Francisco provides more permanent supportive housing per capita than any other city in the U.S., yet ~55% of people experiencing homelessness here are unsheltered. Our shelters aren't perfect, but they were a better place to ride out the 60mph winds yesterday than a tent. 🧵
Another thought on cameras - the ACLU (correctly) embraces them as a tool to hold police accountable, but condemns them as a tool to hold people accountable for committing crimes. Seems inconsistent.
In a controversial pilot program, San Francisco police spent more than 250 hours last year watching live security camera feeds around the city to monitor major events and help bust suspects in crimes ranging from pickpocketing to murder.
Socialists are projecting when accusing liberals of not being Democrats. It’s not moderate San Franciscans who don’t share Democratic values, it is the farthest left who should just form a separate party. But they know they’d lose most local elections, so they run as Democrats.
If only there was partisan competition in local gov't elections.
(SF Dem county party committee has no incentive to tolerate dissidents b/c they can't defect to a non-toxic major party)
“Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who was also present at the vigil, said the board has other priorities it should be focusing on rather than a cease-fire resolution, including the city’s twin crises of homelessness and mental health struggles, as well as property crime.”
Crowds Gather at San Francisco City Hall To Urge Gaza Cease-Fire
Holding Palestinian flags and signs, scores of residents formed a long line, which stretched outside City Hall and around the block, to speak in support of the cease-fire resolution.
How about in place of one of the TWO gas stations sitting across from a major transit hub? What a ridiculous thing to post. Castro and Market is severely underdeveloped and the neighborhood would benefit immensely from more housing.
Love to see the Castro community turn out to beautify the neighborhood with planters outside the Walgreens on Castro & 18th. Thanks
@RafaelMandelman
for making it happen!
Silly headline ignores the fact that San Francisco’s electorate is still more progressive than most cities across the country. We overwhelmingly supported Prop 1 (more mental health beds), are on track to pass Prop A (more affordable housing), and the incumbent judges held on.
Nothing makes people happier than claiming moral superiority on the internet. Look at the joy on his face, the glee as he claims that installing planters is “hurting homeless people.”
Nothing makes these people happier than hurting homeless people. Look at the joy on their faces, the glee in the second photo as she mocks people with nothing to gain showing solidarity with the dispossessed. It’s sociopathic, and it pervades city government.
This will be a decades long fight led by a political movement that rejects the left-libertarian idea that the constitution affords us a right to descend into psychosis and die a premature death, uninterrupted. I think we’re just seeing the beginning of that movement. 23/23
I’ve worked/interned at city hall on and off since 2017 and for the first time in all those years I can sit down at U.N. Plaza and enjoy my lunch here.
New noise cameras in New York City's Upper West Side will snap a pic of cars and motorcycles exceedig 85 decibels (like being next to a lawnmower).
Fines are $220 for a first citation, and up to $2.625 for repeated offenders.
In which DSA explains why it’s okay if it does layoffs because the organization is funded by member contributions, democratic (unlike the public sector?!), and its authority over employees is not “based in class domination.” You can’t make this shit up.
DSA should be thriving, but instead we have a major deficit because we didn’t adequately seize the moment during various political crises. B&R NPC members explain why they have proposed voluntary staff layoffs as a temporary stopgap.
Imagine this: the fourth richest state in the wealthiest nation in human history has finally managed to end the humanitarian crisis of unsheltered homelessness and untreated mental illness/addiction. Let’s get the basics right before dabbling in utopian fantasies.
Imagine this: withdrawing your UBI check that was seamlessly deposited in your public banking account after picking up your kids from awesome public school and then taking green transit back home to your social housing flat
A future we can make happen
This is pretty shameful. We should all be above homophobia in SF politics. As someone whose salary includes automatic contributions to one of the funds that paid for this, I find it disappointing and hope our labor leaders will hold themselves to a higher standard in the future.
Reminder that the people suing the City for not providing enough shelter believe it is “not that much better” than living on the street, and have actively opposed expanding our shelter capacity.
@alanburradell
@fbach4
@RafaelMandelman
I guess I misinterpreted the statement that homelessness is "not that much better in shelter as it is on the streets". Also, saying that people "don't have protections" ignores our comprehensive shelter grievance policy and independent oversight body:
<10% of the most serious dealers are deemed dangerous enough by our local judges to hold pre-trial. SFPD and the DA’s office are doing their jobs, the missing link in this equation is obvious.
4/ Since District Attorney
@BrookeJenkinsSF
took office, the District Attorney’s Office has filed 426 motions to detain the most serious drug dealing suspects because of the extreme public safety risk they pose. Of the 426 detention motions filed, the court has granted 39.
Yet the City and State have failed to create adequate alternative placements for people who are unable to care for themselves and would have received food, healthcare, and shelter in jail twenty, ten or even five years ago. 12/23
Residents of the surrounding blocks are overwhelmingly supportive of these changes and have continued to advocate for them in spite of online harassment by anonymous supporters of the homeless industrial complex. 6/7
@SFMTA_Muni
@davidjacoby
My 7yo legally bikes on sidewalks when the street isn't safe, including this particular ave. Sure, if cars are partially encroaching he can still get past--BUT it's harder for him to see what's ahead and if a car is moving and about to hit him.
Thanks
@SFMTA_Muni
for enforcing!
So we find ourselves at an inflection point where the unintended consequences of the mental health reform movement have become glaringly obvious, but we don’t quite have the political will to get back in the business of building psychiatric hospitals. 21/23
“141 of the people cited are currently receiving cash assistance from San Francisco county, 41 of those people reside in other counties.”
We should not pay people to slowly kill themselves on our streets, or the streets of any other city for that matter.
Nearly half of the people cited for drug use over the past year in San Francisco live outside the city or declined to state where they lived, according to new data.
The result: an ever growing population of people experiencing increasingly acute mental illness who cycle through our ERs and jails with no end in sight. 13/23
A deep dive into the Coalition’s lawsuit and San Francisco’s shelter policy by
@JoeDworetzky
, some highlights: “in a sign of how thoroughly the city’s leaders — one by one — had failed, this problem had bounced from City Hall to the federal courthouse.”
Last year, a hearing on psychiatric emergency services in San Francisco found that five individuals alone over the past five years had at least 1,781 ambulance transports, and 65% of all psych emergency patients at SF General were discharged with outpatient referrals. 15/23
Thank you, San Francisco — for handing the Prop B
#CopTax
a lopsided defeat! Down in the polls when we started, this sends a strong message that voters want real progress on police staffing. Thanks to
@SanFranciscoPOA
,
@MissLily
and everyone in our corner. It means a lot to me.
As of this morning we still have 271 mutual friends on FB, which tells you how “progressives” responded to the first set of allegations. Hoping to see that number go down, and some public statements are in order from those who attempted to rehabilitate his image.
An analysis of high utilizers of emergency medical services found 80-90% have substance use and/or mental health disorders, 98-99% have experienced homelessness, 90% have been booked into jail, and more than one quarter of the 2011 cohort were deceased within 10 years. 14/23
This study on emergency services use by SIP hotel residents “excluded those who died during the study period.” Wouldn’t it be important to know if death rates were higher at SIP hotels than among those living unsheltered, or in traditional shelters? 🧵
This is some wildly authoritarian behavior by
@SFDemocrats
, and shows how far we still have to go in reclaiming a lot of local institutions from the trash can of ideology.
OPINION: Introducing ‘The Lash,’ a new column by
@adamlashinsky
about San Francisco’s power brokers, their competing agendas and where they’re leading the rest of us.
“These are people-made problems. People are to blame. And only people can fix them.”
So what is San Francisco doing about it? Not much, in fact in many ways we’re backsliding - from July 2021 to March 2022, we lost 118 board and care beds, for a net loss of 75 beds to date. And the crisis at Laguna Honda hasn’t helped. 17/23
You know you’re eating from the trash can of ideology when you write a whole article trashing the Castro for being exclusive without mentioning the restrictive zoning and NIMBYism that actually made the neighborhood unaffordable for young LGBTQ people.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the argument but if you’re annoyed that self driving cars are obstructing buses, emergency vehicles, and roadways, wouldn’t disabling lots of them across the city make those problems worse?
Welcome to Week of Cone
On Thurs 7/13, the CPUC will vote to expand AVs in SF. Cruise & Waymo promise they’ll reduce traffic & collisions, but we know that’s not true. They block busses & emergency vehicles, create more traffic, and are a surveillance nightmare.
But there’s hope
I feel bad for anyone who spent the day in San Francisco yesterday and had this reaction. Clearly he had no intention of enjoying Pride or exploring any neighborhoods outside of downtown. Kind of like the kid crying at an amusement park while everyone else has fun.
The San Francisco Pride Parade is like a parody of a decadent civilization - celebrating one last bacchanal before the lights go out. I am documenting it in this thread🧵
If this is the last time you hear from me, please assume I was smited by g*d just for showing up to observe
Strange, I thought you had to opt in to email lists for political campaigns. I’m sure a sitting judge wouldn’t intentionally misuse data acquired from other campaigns…
As many as fifty people pass through SF jails each year who would meet current eligibility criteria for a conservatorship but lack an adequate behavioral health placement at any given time, and cells are frequently occupied by individuals incompetent to stand trial. 16/23
A lot of people around my age don’t think the CCP is any worse than the U.S. government which is an indictment of both our historical literacy and the dwindling shred of moral authority our leaders cling to.
I am cautiously optimistic that Newsom’s mental health bond will be a small step in the right direction, and Senator Eggman is leading the fight to reform LPS’ broken standards for conservatorship. 22/23
Today the Board passed my resolution in support of SB 43 and SB 363, which would create a database displaying information about beds in specified types of facilities, and update the outdated definition of "grave disability" signed into law by Governor Reagan in 1967. 🧵
I also think progressives in San Francisco have a huge blind spot - the fact that according to the 2022 PIT count, almost half of all people experiencing homelessness here either became homeless while living someplace else, or after having been housed here for less than a year.
Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:
"It seems like you're saying, 'we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food'."
Someone should write a book about how extremist political movements funded by powerful entities with ulterior motives use people with mental illness as their foot soldiers.
A protester with Code Pink is facing felony vandalism charges for damaging sidewalks and property during a cease-fire demonstration outside Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home.
California Democrats need to do some serious introspection and come up with a clean slate agenda that guarantees shelter for all who will accept it, compels those who are unable to care for themselves into treatment, and makes it as easy as safely possible to build new housing.
To maintain the moral compass of the Democratic Party, it's important to not become inured to the fact that California produces 30% of America's homelessness and that those 115,000 human beings live some of the most miserable existences that can be found in the developed world.
The Bay Area Council is right - we need to address regional inflows, which means focusing on shelter and establishing enforcement thresholds. San Francisco is 11% of the Bay Area’s population yet we maintain 42% of the region’s permanent housing and 21% of the region’s shelter.
The psychology of people who would rather punish someone for changing their mind on an issue than understand why they changed their mind is fascinating to me. This is not a productive endeavor if your goal is to convince more people to support your position.
Spoiler alert: they haven’t re run the analysis or updated the goal since then. Even less defensible, of those 400 beds, most were lower acuity and DPH has still yet to stand up ANY new locked subacute beds for people with severe mental illness. 19/23
In 1792 the Quakers opened The Retreat in York, England, the first institution that operated under the idea that people with mental illness needed treatment, not discipline and physical restraints. 2/23
Studies and surveys conducted in the 70s, 80s, and 90s found that at least 7-10% of people incarcerated in jails and prisons were severely mentally ill, and approximately 40% of people with mental illnesses had been arrested at some point in their lives. 10/23
I learned a lot about local politics from people who were not super fond of market rate housing and adopted that view for a while. But working for the city and seeing all the ways in which the system is designed to kill housing really opened my eyes to how fucked it is.
Healthy reminder that Calvin Welch (the darling of HANC, one of the biggest arch NIMBY orgs of San Francisco for the last few decades) and his pal, Sue Hestor filed the appeals back in the 70's to kill the housing WHERE I CURRENTLY LIVE TODAY:
When the editorial priority of a newsroom is to be as hostile to public figures as possible you get some ugly excuses for journalism like this. I love aggressive journalism that holds people in power accountable but this is lazy, mean spirited, and missed the mark in a big way.
The situations I put my wife in while I was in addiction were impossible. It's so unfair to use something that happened 18 years ago to stigmatize Rowland, who was just a wife struggling with her husband's addiction.
@sfstandard
According to the 2022 PIT count, almost half of all people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco either became homeless while living someplace else, or after having been housed here for less than a year.
Today, I’m formally requesting a
@SFController
report on known address histories of individuals implicated in our drug crisis to finally quantify — with a reliable methodology — the extent to which San Francisco is a destination city for “drug tourism” and city benefits. (1/4)
Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher…
OPINION: The city is overrun with duplicative, do-nothing commissions that make a mess of San Francisco governance. But this one may be the worst,
@adamlashinsky
writes.
This is one thing pro-tent advocates don’t like to talk about. Some people continue to maintain tents and store items on sidewalks even after entering shelter or housing. Absent some sort of intervention they will continue to do so, eroding public support for funding services.
I have immense respect for the people who run the Coalition on Homelessness, and learned a lot of what I know about homelessness today from them. But I couldn't disagree more with their argument that living in a shelter is "not that much better" than living on the streets.
Just kidding it’s obviously because San Francisco is better than all those other places, but if you’re going to live here you can’t cling to the suburban dream! Having a car will be mildly to moderately inconvenient and you have to deal.
Love to see the trolls lose it at the fact that people want to live here. D**m loop talk and issues aside, anyone who compares S.F. to Detroit or talks about bankruptcy is delusional. We’re in the midst of an important course correction, but we have a solid foundation.
San Francisco’s population is rising again.
New data shows that San Francisco experienced the highest population growth from net migration among California's 58 counties over the last year.
By 1994, over 750,000 people who would have been hospitalized in 1955 were no longer in psychiatric institutions. It’s no coincidence that San Francisco’s jail population peaked at 2,321 in 1992. Our state prison population peaked in 2006 at just over 170,000 people. 9/23
It’s not like the City isn’t capable of bringing hundreds or even thousands of new beds online quickly - just look at the thousands of new permanent supportive housing units we’ve brought online through COVID alone. 20/23
And before you even try, no, I’m not here for the guilt by association “well he follows person X who said Y” - give me an hour to dig through the accounts of everyone you follow and I bet I can find someone who said something you won’t defend.
San Francisco places a lot of people in permanent supportive housing who should be in board & care, or other higher acuity facilities. Unfortunately the state has been unwilling to build those since deinstitutionalization, and the City is under the delusion that PSH is enough.
right now....This tenant is a lovely person, when she's not high. She's taken to spray painting things. For the last 24 hours. She's never going to get the help that she needs in supportive housing. Meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with the toxic odor. Cadillac Hotel.