A Mission Mission reader by the name of Concerned, in the comments section of a recent post about Mayor Newsom’s response to all the violence, says:
And why wouldn’t Hayward and Oakland thugs come to San Francisco and push around the local pussies? It is city policy to have an authenticity-maximizing, “Stuff White People Like” level of picturesque squalor. The complaints of the politicians (and “progressives”) who go out of their way to ensure this state of affairs are what the word “chutzpah” was intended to describe before it got adopted by baptists. What’s the worst that could happen to these guys anyway? This is a place where even dogs don’t respect their owners — “I feel like when you come to San Francisco and shoot up and leave syringes in planters, and have sex with $6 crackwhores in our beloved SROs, and pull guns on people, that you are not respecting me.” No shit, San Francisco is a senile heiress who writes the gardener thousand dollar checks twice a month, and also to his girlfriend. The likeliest response to street shitting is that Daly or some other self-styled “San Franciscan” will require cops to carry toilet paper (and in committee they will stipulate that the toilet paper should be hypoallergenic) for the needy bums. I was once in a New Mexico truck stop and gave some scraps to a local hobo for his dog, and when he asked where I was from I said San Francisco, and he said, Man! you guys have some fucking bums out there! This is what we have come to — our streets offend the sensibility of drifters. And all we have to do is stop sponsoring the fucking offensiveness, decline to pay for the SRO’s and fleabag deathtraps, maybe even try to cite the most appalling nuisances and let them evolve into student housing, or God Forfend, web-programmer housing (as opposed to Richmond drug dealer and pimp housing). That is what would happen naturally if the city stopped intervening on behalf of people who couldn’t give a fuck about it.
Link. Think we can get a “People Before Picturesque Squalor” measure on the ballot? Thanks, Concerned!
i think everyone can understand SROs as a concept in the pure sense: a place for folks to transition into a more mainstream home as they get on their feet, or a longer term place for folks who, due to overtly difficult circumstances, will never be able to transition.
fine. i dont personally love the welfare state idea, but fine. and we already have the things in the hood. so, ok….fine.
not ALL SROs are poorly run…there’s a few (the one over Buno’s for example) that are pretty quiet and fairly innocuous. i am sure there’s shit going down in there, but i don’t see it for the most part, and it’s not spilling out on the the sidewalk in an open-air 24/7 crack-n-ho bazaar. so there’s a (remote) possibility for reasonable situations.
but by and large, they ARE poorly run. look at the 16th & Mission cesspool. it’s driven in a big way by the SROs on Mission bet. 16th & 17th. look at the SRO over Cancun. CONSTANT coming & going of gangbanger / drug dealer / crackhead / ho types. all day, and all night.
so while i personally can (barely) tolerate the idea of transitional or even permanent subsidized housing, i cannot personally tolerate no one taking RESPONSIBILITY for the way these things are run, and the fact that they have become a blight.
so (here i go again)…
i am sure there’s a way to get some sort of ballot initiative going that will REQUIRE the city to take RESPONSIBILITY for this unacceptable blight. maybe not CLOSE the SROs, but MANAGE them, by recourse of law. i don’t think senile heiress SF is going to close em. But there might be a way to get some laws passed that will allow (or force) the Supes, the cops, whomever, to fix em….or close em if they can’t.
and (here’s the big finale) the ONLY way this is likely to happen is if we vote the blood sucking, lying “progressive” parasites out of office on the Board of Supes.
the experiment is over. it failed. it’s been over 40 years since the 1960′s. there’s still not enough affordable housing, there’s still tons of gang violence, the “asylum” efforts are a complete bust in most cases. these guys blew it because they lost their integrity, and became the worst kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit politicians. they’re all leeches, intersted in nothing but themselves.
say it with me: progressive career politicos steal tax dollars to advance their own careers by lying to poor people and guilt ridden liberals.
OK, so let’s get out there and vote. if we can get a moderate D9 Supe elected (there’s only one choice), i will personally do the research to draft, and go door to door and get the signatures required to put an “overhaul the SROs” initiative on the ballot somewhere. i promise.
oh, and again, well spouted, Concerned. thanks for the effort!
zinzin, TL;DR
no idea where anyone would confuse gangsters and killings with homeless people/bums? how is one the result of the other?
i am not sure what TL;DR means.
that said, i think there are a few connections…
one is, the rampant killings and the rampant army of bums in the Mission both point to a complete lack of interest on the part of SF city politicos regarding our hood
another is, regarding SROs, well…they’re meant to be a TEMPORARY resource for folks who might otherwise be homeless, when they’re actually – in many cases – bases of operations for gangsters and drug dealers
lastly, i’d say that a large proportion of the bums – not all – in SF are in fact hopeless junkies, and while my heart goes out to them, cause i’ve been there…it’s generally gangsters who control trade in street drugs, and are also doing the killings.
so while i agree a diatribe on SROs is a tangent from one on the killing sprees, they’re certainly related, if in no other way than they are both evidence points that no on in city government gives a fuck about the Mission.
is this what you’re asking? sorry if i misunderstood.
TL;DR == “Too Long, Didn’t Read”. Actual implication: you’re going on at eye-rolling length about a subject you obviously know jack shit about.
N.B. not saying that I necessarily agree; just trying to give context.
I do think you’re being a bit starry-eyed about SROs as some sort of transitional thing for people who will, with some careful guidance (or market pressure or whatever) eventually get their shit together. Some people might, but a lot of them are pretty much going to stay that way, and given a choice between housing them on the street, in a jail or an SRO, I’d see that as the least of the three evils.
hey, you can Google all these little abbreviations. nice.
ah well, some folks will read em, some won’t. i don’t care. if i move one person to get smart and vote, it’s worth it.
far as knowing jack shit, well, i’m actually fairly accurate in the above. someone wants to point out a specific foible, i’d be happy to learn / correct.
all that said, i understand that most folks aren’t moving out of SROs, ie “longer term place for folks who, due to overtly difficult circumstances, will never be able to transition.”
honestly, i am trying – failing i guess – to be sensitive here. by and large in my experience – which is not insignificant – the folks in SROs on Mission Street, with few exceptions, belong in hospitals or in prison. and if that’s where they belong, then that’s where they should go.
it’s tax dollars misdirected to house them in SROs. there’s no services, no hope for hope, no hope for change. and it’s a fucking blight on my hood. folks can’t walk safely to bart. it’s a disgrace.
better than the street? sure. less shit, needles & condoms for me to clean up.
better than prison? not in my view.
better than hospitals? absolutely not.
but a satisfactory situation to be left as is? that’s just fucking lazy in my opinion.
zinzin: I think we’re actually generally in agreement here, but it is a little odd to see you pointing at the systemic failure of “progressive” housing policy and then turning around and saying that stuffing more people into jails is a better (or at least less-bad) idea. There’s more than one decades-long failure going on in this country’s political culture, and the idea that we can improve the hood by shoveling yet more bodies into jails is most assuredly also one of them: we’re the biggest jailer in the world, and it hasn’t done a damn bit of good so far.
Unless you’re seriously going to agitate for life-no-parole sentences for drug possession, vagrancy and criminal mischief charges, all throwing more people in jail appears to do is increase the number of people on the street who can’t get hired for jobs ever.
(Plus the CA jail system is bankrupt too. Hell, the state is effectively bankrupt. Can’t triple the jail population without paying for it, and the money’s just not there. There’s no help coming from that quarter, and this all goes 10X for the sick joke we call a healthcare system in this country.)
i hear ya, and i do think that we are in fact aligned.
that said, i think a big driver for the sort of crime we’re talking about (right now it seems to be the kind of crime at 16th & Mission) is lack of consequence. sure, it’s also lack of education, opportunity, hope, outreach, community, role models, resources, etc. it’s a complicated ball of string, no doubt.
but the reason 16th & Mission is the way it is…is because it’s allowed to be that way. and it’s allowed to be that way because no one gives a fuck about the Mission.
shiftless crack dealers? those animals belong in jail. I know we jail far too many people, and FAR FAR too many of our African-American & Latino brothers. it’s a huge problem. I’m sorry, i wish i could help them find a better path, and I’m all for programs that do…but if they’re crack dealers – lowest of all life forms, preying on people like parasites – they need to have consequences. what else are we supposed to do? focus only on outreach?
far as the junkies & hos on whom they prey? man, i have no idea how to solve that problem. i’ve been there, and it’s a sad, sad road. as i said, i dont have an issue with SROs if they’re well run and not a driver of what we can see on 16th & Mission. we can have SROs without them being a blight. there’s examples right on my block.
all that being said, i am trying to find a way to improve my little hood, the Mission. and cleaning up that block will go a long way to doing it.
i agree it might be shortsighted in the broader view, but how am i supposed to justify NOT fighting for a cleaned up neighborhood because we don’t have a penal / justice / rehab system that really works?
how can i say (sorry for being sarcastic), “well, the shiftless crack dealers won’t really get rehabilitated in jail, and the jails are kind of full…so let’s let them go on fucking up our neighborhood, ruining lives and preventing me from walking to BART with my kid…Let’s get them into a program”.
it just doesn’t ring for me. we need to do SOMETHING, right?
(and if i indict the “progressive” machine, it’s because i believe it’s hollow and without integrity, and is the central enabler for exactly the social issues it claims to solve.)
Zinzin,
You are definitely a role model. I would just point out one mistake, namely: “the reason 16th & Mission is the way it is…is because it’s allowed to be that way. and it’s allowed to be that way because no one gives a fuck about the Mission.” The reason it is like that is that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by far the largest component of construction budgets was plumbing — you could build out a typical 35 x 100 x 5 floor enormous hotel for less than the cost of plumbing it. So the most common solution was to put in a minimum of pipes, and install one bathroom per floor. There were a lot of residential hotels, San Francisco was once known as the “City of Hotels”. The 6th St and Mission St examples are the last remnants of a formerly predominant building type. Significantly, however, at some point in the late 80′s to 90′s, local pols realized that they had a large constituency in Oberlin grads, Trustafarians, and non-profit workers whose customers depend on hard-core decrepitude, and decided we should spare no expense in stopping the SROs from going out of business. So actually quite the opposite of your original fear — it isn’t that they don’t care, they care quite a bit about maintaining a healthy level of misery.
And thanks for promoting my comment to post, excellent blog!
Yo Concerned. thanks for the kind words. That’s a fascinating history lesson.
i hear ya about self-perpetuating organizations. while i don’t think all are this way…it’s self preservation, right? if there’s no homeless problem, all the homeless orgs have to close, and they don’t want to close.
i know that’s a flip bit of hyperbole (bordering on complete bullshit), but there’s a kernel there…particularly when it’s all frothed up by the bullshit “progressive” machine. that’s how they steal the money right? by allowing a certain level of decrepitude…
there’s always something abstract to fight for.
always a reason to prevent the progress most folks want.
always a reason to focus on dogmatic issues that do nothing to improve people’s lives (like Mark Sanchez spending his entire tenure on the School Board fighting ROTC, instead of focusing on actually improving the schools…the lying, thieving moron).
always a reason to deny the rights of tax payers…in favor of the rights of folks who contribute NOTHING.
I’m not saying those folks have no rights…I’m saying mine are equally important. Just because I’m a working-stiff homeowner doesn’t mean i have no voice.
well, in SF, and in D9 in particular….it does.
my view, we can clean up the hood…and there’s STILL a fucking giant mountain of righteous fights left over.
and all that said, someone needs to take responsibility for the issues caused by the decrepitude IN OUR HOOD. i think that SOMEONE is the D9 Supervisor. and if one of the “progressive” liars is elected, it will be another 4 years minimum till anything is done about it.
GET SMART AND VOTE!
Concerned,
Keep writing fascinating comments, and they’ll keep getting promoted. Thanks for contributing!